Category: Spider-Man

             I’ve been thinking about this all day.  Well, a dozen different versions of this…
            About nine and a half years ago I entered an awful phase.  The small-press, first time author looking for blurbs phase.  It’s when you have no credits to fall back on, no industry clout behind you, but you have to somehow get people with both of these things to read your book and say nice things about it.

            Needless to say, it’s tough.

            Near-impossible.

            I, however, had a plan.

            Since I’d worked in the film industry, and was still writing about it at the time, it occurred to me that rather than go after recognizable authors, I could go after recognizable actors.  Hunt down some of the cult icons that would mesh with a superheroes-fighting-zombies story.  Their names might not carry a ton of weight in the literary world, but they would with the fans I wanted to reach.

            So I called in some favors with people I knew and ended up with a short list of email addresses and phone numbers for certain managers, agents, and small offices.

            Alas, it did not go well.

            I got no response from most of the emails.  My phone calls were stonewalled.  The best response I got was from Bruce Campbell’s manager, who let me give my spiel and then—very pleasantly and politely, without a hint of malice or snark—told me that Bruce was just too busy to be reading anything at the time.

            (Damn you, Burn Notice!  Damn you!!!!!)

            I hit the bottom of my list pretty quick.  And it was my biggest long shot.  A comic legend who had an office in LA… an office I’d managed to get the phone number for.

            I dialed and ran through the spiel one more time in my head.  The friendly-but-casual-but-confident approach that would get me past the person answering the office phone to the person I needed to speak to, who would then get me to the person I wanted to speak to. Well, I had no illusions about actually speaking to him, but hopefully I could convince that second person to hand off my manuscript to–

            “Hey, it’s Stan.”

            To be fair, true believers, I’m not 100% sure that’s what he said.  By the time he’d reached the second word I’d recognized the voice.  The voice I’d heard in hundreds of interviews.  The voice that had narrated all those episodes of Spider-Man and his Amazing Friends when I was a kid.

            That voice on the phone knocked pretty much every coherent thought I had out of my head.  He was on the phone!  With me!  Right NOW!  I WAS ON THE PHONE WITH STAN LEE!!!

            “Hello?”

            I was still kind of in shock, but I realized I needed to say something or he was going to hang up.  I still couldn’t get my thoughts in gear, though.  Couldn’t adapt, couldn’t stay professional, couldn’t…

            I blurted out my spiel, probably at double time, all in one breath, and ended up asking Stan Lee if I could speak to whoever could get me in touch with Stan Lee.

            There was a pause at the other end of the line, then a little laugh, and then “Yeah, just hang on.”  At which point I heard the phone get muffled, handed off, and found myself speaking to someone else who brusquely assured me Stan was far too busy for whatever my request was and clickthe call was over.

            I’m sure he’d forgotten about it five minutes later, but I’ll never forget the brief moments I found myself talking with one of the most influential people in my life.

            Well, okay…  babbling at him.  And him taking it good naturedly.

            Rest In Peace, Stan.  You were inspirational in so many ways, to so many millions of creators, and I wouldn’t be here today without you.
            Excelsior!

           I wanted to revisit something I blabbed on about a few years back.  I’ve kind of touched on it a few times since then, but I thought it would be good to just babble on about it more specifically.  So if you’ve been reading this for a while and you have a phenomenal memory… sorry.

            I see a lot of television shows that are getting rolled out and cancelled just as fast.  One thing that amazes me is how many of them don’t really seem like television ideas.  They’re cool ideas, yes, but many of them are very A-to-B sort of stories.  My characters have been presented with a single, overriding problem or conflict, and once they resolve it… well, that’s it.  Which is a great thing for a feature film or a single season, but very rarely works well with a long-running series.

            And I’d say that long string of cancellations kind of backs me up on that.

            Some story ideas are, as I just mentioned, pretty much straight line affairs.  There may be a few steps, but in the end it comes down to achieving a single goal.  There are also the broad ideas, the ones you tell people and they say, wow, that could go on forever.  In the past, I’ve referred to these, respectively, as limited and unlimitedconcepts.

            What do I mean by that?

            An unlimited concept generally has a very broad scope.  Sherlock Holmes uses deductive reasoning to solve mysteries.  Spider-Man and Batman fight crime to make up for the death of their loved ones.  Captain America and Superman fight to protect rights and ideals that they believe in.  Joe Ledger is a soldier turned cop turned super-agent working for the mysterious Mr. Church (or is it Mr. Deacon?).  The crew of the starship Enterpriseexplores the distant reaches of the galaxy.  Jack Reacher just wants to wander and see the country, but he’ll stop to help folks out sometimes.  Detective Kennex and his android partner, Dorian, investigate homicides in the future.

            A key thing to note.  When we talk about unlimited concepts, nine times out of ten we end up talking about the characters over the plot.  Sometimes it’s the setting, but usually it’s the characters.  An unlimited concept isn’t about a specific set of events, which is why it’s also sometimes also called an open story.

            A limited concept, as the name implies, can only go so far.  As I mentioned above, it’s an idea that has an end inherently built into the concept.  A road trip story is a classic limited concept—as I mentioned above, it’s A-to-B.  We’re trying to get (physically or metaphorically) from here to there.  The passengers of Oceanic flight 815 want to be rescued from their weird tropical island and the residents of Chester’s Mill want to be rescued from the big invisible dome over their town. Tom Jackman wants to find a way to control his dark half.  Mark Watney wants to find a way to survive on Mars for the years until a rescue mission comes.  The crew of the starship Voyagerwants to make their way home from the other side of the galaxy.

            In all of these cases, the characters have very clear, straightforward goals.  Once that goal’s reached, the story is over.  It doesn’t mean everybody in Chester’s Mill lives happily ever after or the Voyager crew never goes into space again, but those are all different stories which don’t have to do with the premise I mentioned above.

            Why am I babbling about this?

            If I don’t understand what kind of an idea I have, it’s very easy for me to mess it up.  Trying to play one as the other almost never works.  By their very nature, these concepts are very true to themselves.

            For example…

            Several years back I was part of the staff for an online game.  One time while we were brainstorming new quests for the playerbase, someone suggested taking one of the old ruined castles at the fringes of the map and making it haunted.

            “Okay,” I said.  “And…?”

            “It’s a haunted castle.”

            “Right.  So what’s the quest?”

            “It’s.  Haunted.”

            An unlimited concept is almost never a story in and of itself.  It’s almost always lacking any sort of plot or narrative structure.  I need to add elements to make it work as a story (or a quest).  A fair number of “art” films tend to be unlimited concepts—they’ve got fantastic characters, beautifully rendered locations… but nothing else.  Nothing happens because unlimited concepts don’t contain a conflict or goal for the characters to strive for.

            On the other hand, a common thing I see people do with limited concepts is to keep pushing the goal away to extend the story (or series).  It’s an A-to-B, which means when I hit B the story is over.  So some folks will swerve around B for a while, maybe go back to A because they forgot a few things.  Somehow we end up at 4.2 (no idea how we got here), then we get close to B and veer off at the last minute…  If I’m doing a Los Angeles to Boston road trip, think how annoying it would be to start circling Boston but never actually get there.  Or I suddenly find out I need to be in San Diego instead.  That’s what it’s like when a limited concept artificially extends itself.

            It’s also cheap if I pile on the limited concepts, giving my characters a dozen or three goals that need to be achieved—either all at once or one after another (see above).  In my earlier days, before I had a better grasp of structure, I thought this was how you filled a book.  I still see lots of writers do it when they start out.

            The truth is, it’s very tough for either of these concepts to work alone.  An unlimited one almost never does, but that hasn’t cut down on the number of art films or “experimental” stories.  A limited one might squeak by as what’s often called a “plot driven” story.  Neither of these tends to be very satisfying.

            For a really great book or screenplay, I need both working together.  I need to put that fantastic character (the unlimited concept) and give them a solid goal they need to achieve (the limited concept).  As I’ve often said, my story won’t succeed without good characters, but they also need to do something and it needs to challenge them somehow. 

            If I don’t have good characters or I don’t have them doing anything… well…

            The math isn’t that hard.           

            Look through that document of story ideas.  Or the file folder.  Or the notebook.  If you’re reading this, odds are you’ve got at least one of those.  Figure out if your ideas are limited or unlimited.  Because then you can figure out what they need to become solid stories.

            Next time… well, there haven’t been many comments lately, so I’m guessing none of this stuff interests a lot of you.  So next week I’ll try to redeem myself

            So very late.  So very, very sorry.  Thanks for your patience.

            By the way, just hold that there and press.  If you don’t, it’s going to keep oozing.

            Hey, speaking of medicine…

            A friend of mine is a med student and she’s joked with me a couple times about the television show House.  Believe it or not, House was a very unrealistic view of medicine.  But it was unrealistic on a level most folks don’t consider.  On the show, tests that would take days were often run in hours.  Treatments showed results in minutes instead of days.  Even his revival rate was amazing.  Said friend told me the odds of actually reviving someone who crashes in the real world—well, they’re not good.  CPR saves lives, but nowhere near as many as you’d like to think.  But on House they pulled it off at least every other episode.

            There’s a concept you may have heard of (or some variation of) that we’ll call compressed storytelling.  Very simply put, it’s the idea that we can skim over a lot of time and events without it affecting our story.  As the name implies, certain events are compressed so I can spend more time with others. 

            Most short-form stories—movies, episodic television, and short stories—are usually compressed to some degree or another.  Alfred Hitchcock—director, storyteller, partner of the Three Investigators—once said that drama is real life with all the boring parts cut out.  That’s also a good way to sum up compressed storytelling.

            Compressing the story often builds tension and knocks the stakes up a bit.  Silly as it may sound, compressing the story builds pressure.  If my villain plants a bomb in the city that’s going to go off in two months, that’s not a lot of pressure on the hero.  If it’s going to explode in twenty minutes… that’s a bit more urgent.  Likewise, if my hero (or heroine) has eight semesters to tell Phoebe his true feelings for her, he’s got a while to think about it.  If she leaves in two weeks for a year abroad with Steve Carlsburg (man, that guy’s such a jerk)… well, our protagonist needs to get his or her act together now..           

           Now, the flipside of this is decompressed storytelling.  It’s the idea that I should take my time and include everything.  And I mean everything.  Every single detail and nuance and fact, whether they’re relevant to the story I’m telling or not.  If we’re going to believe Hitchcock (and the man did know a few things about storytelling), this is when we add all the boring parts back in.  Supposedly also in the name of drama.

            Y’see, Timmy, decompressing the story takes the pressure off my characters.  If they have time to sit in a diner talking about the movie they saw last week or their intense feelings about Miracle Whip, there really can’t be anything else urgent going on in their life.  Yeah, good characters might have an occasional conversational segue, but it’s the difference between randomly commenting that I don’t like ketchup and telling the half hour storyabout the scarring childhood event that made sure I never touched the stuff again.

           Here’s an even better example.  I could tell you that I woke up this morning and sat down to write this week’s post (a few days late)… 

            Or I could tell you that I woke up, rolled over, folded my pillow in half, and went back to sleep for ten minutes.  Then my girlfriend got up and I looked at the clock and realized I really needed to get up because I have a deadline coming up, but first I tried to remember some bits of a dream I had.  Then I wandered into the bathroom, did my morning business, so to speak (we’ll skip over details there for the sake of politeness), washed my hands, dried them on the tan towel that doesn’t match the rest of the bathroom because I could only get one in the correct color, and then spent a minute playing with my hair.   I’m thinking about trying a new style, something like the brushed-forward cut Jonny Lee Miller has on Elementary.  We’ve got similar hairlines, so I think it could work for me. 

            Anyway, then it was off to the kitchen for my morning yogurt drink and a bit of grumbling at the fridge when I realized I drank the last of the Diet Pepsi last night.  Which is clearly the fridge’s fault and not mine.  I checked Facebook and Tumblr and even Google+, even though I’m honestly thinking of dumping G+ and going back to MySpace, just so I feel like I’m getting a better use of my time.  It just doesn’t get the response that either Facebook or Tumblr does.  My friend Bo put it in a good way, that Google+ just never hit that critical mass where a site really takes off.

            Then my girlfriend and I debated when we should go to the grocery store, because I needed Diet Pepsi and we also needed cat litter. But we were hoping the new Star Trek: Attack Wing ships will come out today because we love the game and we want that Borg tactical cube.  If we were going out later for that, it’d be much more time-efficient to do all our shopping at once.  But we didn’t know if the ships were definitely coming out today or not, which would also affect dinner plans because if we went over to Game Empire we’d probably grab a slice of pizza at Mamas and Papas and call that dinner.

            Then there was a minor panic attack after an email with my editor.  Turns out I had that deadline wrong and I was really freaking out before he calmed me down and assured me I could work for another two ort three weeks and it wouldn’t change a thing on his end.  So I took a few deep breaths, made a joke about how this just feeds into my drinking problem, poured myself a drink, and then sat down to write today’s ranty blog.

            Which, as a reminder after all that, is about how I don’t need to include every single detail and nuance and fact.

            And, man, I did not have time for all that.  I’m on a deadline…

            In my experience, some writers fall back on decompressed storytelling when they don’t actually have much story to tell.  I can’t make my novel lean and tight because if I did it’d only be three chapters long.  So I fill it up with segues and character moments and drawn out descriptions. 

            The common excuse for this is that I’m being “literary.”  I’m raising the bar and writing at a higher level than the rest of you.  All you people who keep skimming over those character moments and beautiful details and exquisite language in favor of things like “plot” and “action”… you’re the ones responsible for the dumbing down of America.

            I think a lot of this mindset is a function of something I’ve mentioned before—the very special episode syndrome.  If you’re not familiar with it, the very special episode is when a series does something a bit out of character.  Sitcoms do a serious story about abuse or racism.  Dramas do an all-musical episode.  Superhero comics spend an issue dwelling on the nature of mental health and suicide.  These decompressed stories tend to get a lot of notice and praise because they’re daring to push the envelope a bit and do something that radically contrasts their usual material.  I’m sure anyone reading this can come up with dozens of examples of such things.

            Something to take note of, though, is part of the reason the very special episode works is because of that contrast.  When we see a story where Spider-Man deals with one of his regular foes going kind of crazy and eventually killing himself, it has a lot more punch than if we read about a similar story in a psychiatric textbook.  Its rareness makes it special.  It’d be interesting to see what James Bond or Freddy Krueger do when they’ve got an absolutely free day, but it’s also going to wear pretty thin by the end of the first act.

            This is the big mistake I think people make with VSE (my new abbreviation), and it’s something else I’ve talked about before.  It’s when I look at the rare exception and assume that’s the rule.  It’s when I think the one aberration is what we should all be following.  If one story about Spider-Man dealing with mental health does well, we should do five!  Or ten!  Hell, why would we do anything except mental health issues? 

            This is why the last four seasons of Scrubswere all about people dying from cancer and drug overdoses, by the way…

            Now, as I often say, there is a place for both of these things.  I am a very big proponent of the idea that if you want to succeed in this business (the business of selling stories for money), then less is more.  But to automatically declare either method “wrong” is… well, just wrong. 

            If everything I’m writing is all one or all the other, though… maybe I should stop for a moment and reconsider.  Do I actually have a story and plot?  Are my characters dynamic and trying to resolve a conflict?  Or am I using decompressed storytelling to hide the lack of these things behind a lot of flowery language and drawn out, irrelevant dialogue?

            Are my characters fleshed out?  Is my setting well established?  Or am I skimming past plot points as fast as I can so nobody will notice I don’t have these things?

            Maybe it’s time to adjust the pressure a bit.

            Speaking of which, next time, there’s an idea I’d like to impress upon you…

            Until then, go write.

            First off, many thanks to all of you for your patience.  The new book’s been especially troublesome and I’ve been banging my head against it for a few weeks.  Plus there’s a bunch of other stuff going on that’s been taking away valuable pontification time…

            Anyway, I hope you found some of the screenwriting interviews mildly interesting.  Just as a warning, there may be one or two in the near future.  But, for the next few weeks, I’m back with actual posts.

            So, what am I talking about with that amazing, pop-culture title?

            Well…

            Tony Faville is one of those guys you read about in books.  He’s just had way too interesting a life to be a real person.  He signed up with the Navy and went into the medical corps.  He became a combat doctor and was assigned to the Marines, where he was on the ground for the first Iraq War (the one started by the smarter Bush).  When he got out of the Navy, Tony decided to become a chef and ended up working for several restaurants.  And after years of doing that, he decided to start writing novels and produced fun stuff like Kings of the Dead and the Avery Nolan supernatural detective series.

            Like I said, way too interesting to be real.

            A few months back I was at a convention with Tony (we’ve got the same publisher) and overheard him making a wonderful analogy.  Someone was asking about how to do something, and—as I’ve done a few times–Tony related being a writer to being a chef.  As he explained it, there was one question he’d get all the time from people as they started working with him.

            “Chef, what’s the best knife for me to buy?”

            I’m now going to paraphrase Tony’s answer.   

            Start with the cheapest knife you can find and work with it for a while.  See how it fits in your hand, how it feels when you cut different things.  If it’s not comfortable, toss it and move up to the next knife. 

            At the end of the day, no matter who makes it, no matter how much it costs, there is no right knife.  There’s just the knife that’s right for you.  So why spend months struggling with a $300 knife when there may be a $20 one out there that was made to fit in your hand?

            Y’see, Timmy, that’s a lot like writing.  You’ll hear a lot of people offer their advice.  Some of them may insist things must be done this way.  But in most cases, writing boils down to what works for you.  If I need to outline the whole story before I start writing, I shouldn’t waste my time trying to be spontaneous.  If I write better at night, it doesn’t matter how many people say to start with five hundred words before breakfast.  If I need to dress up like Spider-Man to write…well, hopefully I look good in tights, but it really doesn’t matter because I’ll be at home writing.

            One of the most important things to do as a writer is to recognize all the optional hints and suggestions for what they are and just weed out the useless ones that don’t apply to me.   Like those television cooking shows that are more about getting you to buy a $300 dollar knife, a $150 measuring cup, and are so glad that last commercial has got you thinking about becoming a chef.  No matter what anyone says, no matter who says it, all that matters is what works for me.  That’s the golden rule, and I’ve brought it up here a bunch of times.  What works for me won’t necessarily work for you, and it definitely won’t work for that other guy.

            Yeah, like cooking, there’s still a lot of things I will have to do.  It’s the difference between methods and actual rules.  I need to have some kind of knife, and I need a basic understanding of grammar.  I don’t want to serve undercooked eggs or pork, and I also don’t want every page to be a pile of misspelled or misused words.   I have to add ingredients in a specific order to get a certain taste, and I need to structure sentences and paragraphs to tell a certain story.   I’ve got the freedom to choose whatever knife I want, and to cook whatever I feel like, but that doesn’t mean I can thrown anything I want in a pot or frying pan and people are required to show up and eat it.  I’ve got to cook something people want to eat, and I can’t complain if I’m writing something nobody’d want to read.

            So don’t waste your time trying to find the perfect knife.  Just find the knife that works for you.

            Speaking of cutting, next time I thought I’d talk a bit about some quick edits I always make when I dive into later drafts.

            Until then, go write.