Category: Star Trek

            Geeky Star Trek reference.  I’ll explain as we go along…

            But first, a story…

            Back when I was a young man in college and our country had just won its liberty from the British Empire, I took a class on early American literature.  There were only two books to study, both from earlier that month.  It was considered an “easy A” course.

            Okay, that joke died pretty quick.

            Anyway, I was in my early American literature class and we were discussing Wielandby Charles Brockdon Brown, first published in 1798.  It’s considered an early American classic, the first noteworthy American novel, and its author died penniless and drunk in a snowbank.  Story is, his own mother wouldn’t even buy his books.  He was pretty much unknown during his lifetime outside of a small circle, which shrank rapidly after his death.  It wasn’t until the 1920s that he became kind of known and retroactively entered into the canon of great literature.

            I asked my professor about this.  Why was this book now being considered great literature?  It had failed then, and barely anyone knew about it now, how does it qualify?  Surely is it was great, people would read it on their own.  Why should we consider it relevant nowwhen the author’s own mother didn’t even consider it relevant then?

            Rather then telling me to shut up or tossing me out of his class, said professor congratulated me for bringing up a good point.  What’s considered “great literature” changes all the time.  Every time someone publishes a new paper on Longfellow, Irving,  Melville, or Dickinson… the canon changes.  A lot of what we consider “classics” were either ignored or thought of as populist crap in their time. A fraction of it was literature.  Almost none of it was art.

            Back in 1989 (just around the time I was questioning my professor about Brown’s book), Robin Williams gave an interview where he talked about a production of Waiting for Godot that he’d been in with Steve Martin the year before.  “I dread the word ‘art,’” Williams told the AP.  “That’s what we used to do every night before we’d go on with Waiting for Godot.  We’d go, ‘No art.  Art dies tonight.’  We’d try to give it a life, instead of making Godotso serious.”

            Believe it or not, the play sold out every performance.  People loved it.  They lined up every night hoping for no-shows and cancelled reservations.

            Williams knew something a lot of folks just can’t wrap their heads around.  I can’t make art.  No matter how much I try or how long I work or how many guides I follow, art isn’t up to me.  It’s up to everyone else.  And how they define art changes all the time.  With every new paper or critique or review, what’s art now becomes shallow and tired.  And the hack stuff that stands the test of time?  Well, suddenly that’s art.  Or maybe not.  Nobody knows.

            Y’see, Timmy, art doesn’t suck, but trying to make art really does.  And usually (not always, but usually, in my experience), the results of trying to make art suck.  It feels forced and pretentious.  There’s so much message there’s no actual story.  It’s so busy trying to be art that it doesn’t feel alive.

            Before I worry about art, I need to worry about my plot and my story. Do I have believable characters?  Will my readers identify with them and want to see what happens to them?  Do they have arcs?  Do they have good dialogue?  Are there interesting challenges for my characters to overcome?  Is the outcome ever in doubt?  Does tension build?

            If I don’t have a good story, art is irrelevant because no one’s going to read it.  I can have the most magnificent sentence structure and vocabulary ever committed to paper, but if my characters are boring it doesn’t matter because the reader’s going to put the manuscript down in six or seven pages.  Because boring characters are… well, boring.  That sounds painfully obvious, I know, but you’d be surprised how many people ignore that simple fact in the name of art.

            Somebody once said “don’t try to be a great man—just be a man.  Let history make its own judgments.”  And the same goes for my story.  It just has to be a story.

            Someone else will decide if it’s art or not.

            I shouldn’t be worrying about that.
            By the way, before I forget, there’s still about a dozen galley copies left in that pre-order promo deal I mentioned a few weeks back.

            Next time, I’d like to talk a little bit about talking a little bit.

            Until then, go write.

            Very sorry about missing last week.  Copyedits. And Thanksgiving is this week, so I know nobody’s going to be reading this on Thursday.  So I figured I’d get this up today and hope to break even.  Sort of…

            Anyway, this week I wanted to blab on about dating your work.  And I figured the best way to do that would be to talk about the Cat & Fiddle.

           If you’re not familiar with Los Angeles, the Cat & Fiddle has been a Hollywood landmark for about thirty years now.  It’s a little pub in the middle of Hollywood with a nice outdoor patio.  It’s always been popular, but I think it managed to avoid being hip or trendy in all that time.  Part of Casablanca was filmed on that location.  Seriously.

            Heck, there’s a reference to the Cat & Fiddle about halfway through my book, 14.  It was a landmark, as I said, and my story is very much about Los Angeles.  Why wouldn’t I refer to it?

            Except now it’s closing.  The landlord found someone willing to pay twice as much so, well, the cat’s out in the cold.  No more Cat & Fiddle unless they can find a new place.  Somewhere else.

            What’s my point?

            Just like that, 14 has become dated.
             Still, I’m not as bad off as James P. Hogan.  When he wrote his novel Inherit the Stars (first book in the Giants series) back in 1977, he envisioned the US facing off against the Soviet Union in a race to colonize the solar system (a race that gets interrupted by an amazing discovery, granted…).  Needless to say, the first three books in that series are extremely dated.

            When we say a book is dated, we mean it’s a book someone can look at and say “Ahhh, well this was clearly written back when…”  It’s a book that isn’t about now, it’s about then.  And when my book’s not about now, that’s just another element that’s making it harder for someone to relate to my characters and my story. 

            Remember in school when you had to read classics?  Some of the hardcore Dickens or Austen or maybe even Steinbeck.  One of the reasons they can be hard to read is because of the references in them.  They talk of events or customs or notable persons that are foreign to us.  Hell, half the time so foreign they’re just gibberish (bundling?  What the heck is bundling..?).

            When we hit these stumbles, it breaks the flow and makes the book harder to enjoy.  A dated book has a shelf life, like milk or crackers.  The moment it gets this label, there’s an end in sight.

            Because of this, there’s a common school of thought that I shouldn’t make any such references in my work.  My story shouldn’t mention current fads or events.  I don’t want to have references to celebrities or television shows or bands or music.  If I want to have my writing to have any sort of extended life—the “long tail” as some folks like to call it—it can’t be dated.

            And there is something to this.  I’ve seen metaphor-stories fall flat with readers less than a year after the events they’re referencing.  It was funny at the time, but if you watch Aladdin today it’s tough to figure out half the stuff the Genie’s riffing on (what the heck’s with the whoop-whoop fist thing…?).

            However…

            When the GOP shut down the US government last year, my friend Timothy Long pounded out a longish comedy short story called Congress of the Dead.  And for a few months it sold really, really well.  It’s not doing much these days (it’s still funny but not as topical), but he knew going in that it wasn’t going to be timeless and used that knowledge to his advantage.

            So, which way should I go?

            Well, here’s the catch.  My work is always going to end up dated.  Always.  There’s no avoiding it.  Stories get dated by technology and cars and geography. Things people assume will never change (like the Cat & Fiddle or the U.S.S.R.) end up changing. It happens all the time.  It can’t be helped.

            Consider this…

            Stephen King’s Cujo couldn’t happen today.  Cell phones undermine the entire plot.  Same with Fred Sabehagan’s Old Friend of the Family.  The entire plot of Lee Child’s first Jack Reacher book, Killing Floor, hinges on an idea that was obsolete six months before the book even reached stores.

            Let’s not even talk about speculative fiction.  How many sci-fi shows predicted events we’ve since caught up with and passed?  Buck Rogers left Earth on a deep space probe in 1987, and Thundar the Barbarian saw the world collapse in 1994.  Star Trek told us the Eugenics Wars happened in the 1990s, which was also when Khan and his followers were launched into space in cryogenic suspension (presumably using the technology from the Buck Rogers deep space probes).  According to the Terminator franchise, Judgement Day happened in 1997 (later adjusted to 2004).  Then there’s 2001: A Space Odyssey and it’s sequel 2010.  Heck, even Back to the Future is just a few short weeks away from becoming a silly, dated comedy.  It’s going to be 2015 and there are no self adjusting clothes or flying cars or Jaws XIX (it looks like we did get hoverboards, though…).  And, hell, supposedly in 2015 people are still using faxes as a high-tech method of communication.

            If I really don’t want to date my work, I can’t mention anything.  Cars, music, movies, television shows, networks, books, magazines, sports teams, games, cell phones or providers, Presidents, politicians, political parties, countries, businesses of any kind, actors, actresses… all these things and a few dozen more. All these things change all the time in unpredictable ways.  So if I want to be timeless, I can’t bring up any of them.

            The problem is, though, these are all things that are part of our lives. They come up in conversations.  They shape how we react to other things.  So if I’m writing a realistic character with natural dialogue… these things will be there.

            So what’s this all mean?

            In the big scheme of things… don’t worry about it.

            That being said, I  probably shouldn’t base my entire plot around readers knowing the lyrics to Taylor Swift’s latest single, and (much as I love it) I might not want to use a reference to the second season finale of Chuck as the big button on my chapter.  There’s a reason some things stand the test of time, some become cult classics, and others become… well, we don’t know, do we?  And I should never be referencing something no one knows about.

            There isn’t an easy answer for this.  I’d love to list off some rules or just be able to say “8.3 references per 50 pages is acceptable,” but it isn’t that simple.  A lot of this is going to be another empathy issue.  As a writer, I need to have good sense of what’s sticking around and what’s a fleeting trend.  What references will people get in ten years, which ones they’re going to forget in six months, and how blatant these references need to be to get the job done.

            Getting dated is unavoidable.  It is going to happen to my work.  And yours. And hers.  But if we’re smart about it, we can get the most out of it while we can and still make sure that date’s as far off as possible.

            Next time, I’d like to talk about dialogue.  And I’ll probably make a mess of it.

            Or a drama king.  I don’t judge…

            When we left off, I’d just finished babbling about narrative structure, which is how my readers experience a story.  Before that was linear structure–how my characters experience a story.  This week, I want to talk about how those two structures come together within a dramatic structure to form the actual story.

            Warning you now, this is going to be kind of big and rambling, but I’ve also included a lot of pictures.  Go grab a snack now and hit the restroom.  No one will be admitted during the dreadful story dissection scene…

            Also (warning the second), the story I’m going to dissect is The Sixth Sense.  If you’ve never seen it and somehow avoided hearing about it until now, stop reading and go watch it.  Seriously, if you’ve made it this long without having someone blow it for you, you need to see that movie cold.  People love to give M. Night Shyamalan crap, but there’s a reason The Sixth Sense made him a superstar writer-director.  So go watch it and then come back.  The ranty blog will be here waiting for you when you get back.
            Seriously.  Go.  Now.

            Okay, everyone back?

            As the name implies, dramatic structure involves drama.  Not in the “how will I make Edward love me” sense, but in relation to the building interactions between the elements of the story.  In most cases, these elements will be characters, but they can also be puzzles, giant monsters, time limits, or any number of things that keep my protagonist(s) from achieving his or her goal.  Any story worth telling (well, the vast, overwhelming majority of them) are going to involve a series of challenges and an escalation of tension.  Stakes will be raised, then raised again.  More on this in a bit.  

            Now, I don’t mean to scare you, but I’ve prepared a few graphs.  Don’t worry, they’re pretty simple and straightforward.  If you’ve been following the ranty blog for a while, they might even look a little familiar.

            On this first graph (and all the others I’ll be showing you) X is the progression or the story, Y is dramatic tension.  This particular graph shows nothing happening (the blue line).  It’s an average day at the office, or maybe that long commute home on the train.  It’s flat and monotone.  No highs, no lows, no moments that stand out.

            Boring as hell.

            Harsh as it may sound, this graph is a good representation of a lot of little indie art films and stories.  There are a lot of wonderful character moments, but nothing actually happens.  Tonally, the end of the story is no different than the beginning.

            As a story progresses, tension needs to rise.  Things need to happen.  Challenges need to arise and be confronted.  By halfway through, the different elements of the story should’ve made things much more difficult for my main character.  As I close in on the end, they should be peaking. 

            Mind you, these don’t need to be gigantic action set pieces or nightmarish horror moments.   If the whole goal of this story is for Wakko to ask Phoebe out without looking like an idiot, a challenge could be finding the right clothes or picking the right moment in the day.  But there needs to be something for my character to do to get that line higher and higher..

            Now, here’s the first catch…

            Some people start with the line up high.  They begin their story at eight and the action never stops (I’m looking at you, Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest).  This doesn’t leave a lot of room for things to develop, but the idea is that you don’t have time to see that because we’re hitting the ground running and going until we drop.

            You might notice the line on this graph looks a lot like that first one up above.  It’s pretty much just a straight line because there isn’t anywhere for things to go.  And, as we established, straight lines are pretty boring.  They’re monotone, and monotone is dull whether the line’s set at one-point-five or at eleven.

            That’s the second catch.  Dramatic structure can’t just be a clean rise like that second graph.  That’s another straight line.  And straight lines are… well, I’m sure you get it by this point.  In a good story, there will be multiple challenges and the hero isn’t going to succeed at all of them.  He or she will win in the end, of course, but it’s not going to be easy getting there.  They’ll face mistakes, surprises, bigger challenges, and determined adversaries.  For every success, there’s going to be some setbacks.  So that blue line needs to be a series of peaks and drops. 

            If you know your physics, you know that we don’t feel a constant velocity.  Think about riding in a car.  As long as it’s a steady speed, you don’t notice.  You can drink coffee, move around, whatever.  What we feel is acceleration—the change in velocity.  Those ups and downs are when things stand out, when we know something’s happening.

            Make sense?

            So, with that in mind, here’s a big graph.

             This is everything together.  X is narrative structure.  It’s the story progressing from page one until the end of my story, novel, or screenplay.  Y is dramatic structure. We can see the plot rising and falling as the characters have successes and failures which still continue to build.  And the letters on the blue line are the linear structure.  We’re beginning at G, but there are two flashbacks in there that go back to A and D.

            Notice that D-F flashback.  Even though it’s near the end of the story, it’s got more dramatic weight than G through K.  This is the big, easy trick to dramatic structure.  No matter what my narrative is doing, it has to keep increasing the tension.

            Y’see, Timmy, this graph is what pretty much every story should look like if I map it out.  They’re all going to start small in the beginning and grow.  We’ll see tension rising and falling as challenges appear, advances are made, and setbacks occur.  They’re not going to be exactly like this, but the basic structure—an escalating, jagged line—is almost always a given.  Small at the start, increase with peaks and dips, finish big.

            Simple, yes?

            Keep in mind, this isn’t an automatic thing.  This is something I, as the writer, need to be aware of while I craft my story.  If I have a chapter that’s incredibly slow, it shouldn’t be near the end of my book.  If a scene has no dramatic tension in it at all, it shouldn’t be in the final pages of my screenplay.  And if it is, it means I’m doing something wrong.

            Now, that being said, it should be clear that where things happen within a narrative is going to effect how much weight they have.  Again, dramatic structure tells us that things in the beginning are small, things at the end are big.  Something that’s an amazing reveal at the end of the story won’t have the same impact at the beginning.

            Let me give you an example.  It’s the one I warned you about at the top.  I’d like to tell you an abridged version of The Sixth Sense.  But I’d like to tell it to you in linear order.

            Ready?

            The Sixth Sense is the story of Malcolm, a child therapist who is killed by one of his former patients in a murder-suicide.  Malcolm becomes a ghost, but doesn’t realize he’s died so he continues to “see” his patients.  Several months later, across the city, a woman becomes jealous of her new husband’s daughter, Kyra, and begins to slowly poison the girl.  It’s about this time that Malcolm meets Cole, a little boy with the power to see ghosts, and decides to take Cole on as a patient, helping him deal with the crippling fear the ghosts cause.  When Kyra finally succumbs to the poison and becomes a ghost, she finds Cole, too—inadvertently terrifying him when she does.  Malcolm suggests to Cole that helping her might help him get over his fear.  Cole helps expose Kyra’s stepmother as a murderer and also helps Malcolm come to realize his own status as one of the deceased.  And everyone lives happily ever after.  Even the dead people.

            The happily ever after is a bit of an exaggeration, granted, but it should make something else clear.  When the narrative of this story follows the linear structure, a huge amount of drama is stripped away.  It’s so timid and bland it almost reads like an after-school special rather than a horror movie.  A lot of the power of this story came from the narrative structure.  The order Shyamalan told this story in is what gave it such an amazing dramatic structure (and made him a household name).

            This is what I’ve talked about a few times with flashbacks and non-linear storytelling.  There needs to be a reason for this shift to happen at this point—a reason that continues to feed the dramatic structure.  If my dramatic tension is at seven and I go into a flashback, that flashback better take it up to seven-point-five or eight.  And if it doesn’t, I shouldn’t be having a flashback right now.  Not that one, anyway.

            For the record, this is also why spoilers suck.  See, looking up at the big graph again, E is very high up in the dramatic tension.  It’s a big moment, probably a game-changing reveal, in a flashback.  If I tell you about E before you read the story (or see the movie or watch the episode or whatever), I’ve automatically put E at the beginning–it’s now one of the first events you’ve encountered in the narrative.   And because it’s at the beginning, it’s now equal to G in dramatic tension.  Because things at the start of the story always have very low tension ratings.

            The thing is, though, E isn’t at the start of the story.  It’s near the end.  So now when I get to where E really is in the story, it isn’t that big spike anymore.  It’s down at the bottom.  The dramatic structure of the story is blown because I didn’t get that information at the right point.  It even looks wrong on the graph when the blue  line bottoms out like that.

            If you want an example of this (without giving anything away), consider Star Trek Into Darkness.  I can’t help but notice that a lot of people who were demanding to know plot and character information  months before the movie came out were also the same ones later complaining about how weak the story was.  Personally, I went out of my way to avoid spoilers and found the movie to be very entertaining.  It wasn’t the most phenomenal film of the summer, but I had a lot of fun with it

            It’s dismissed as coincidence.

            Now, here’s one last cool thing about dramatic structure.  It makes it easy to spot if a story is worth telling.  I don’t mean that in a snide, demeaning way.  The truth is, though, there are a lot of stories out there which just aren’t that interesting.  Since I know a good story should follow that ascending pattern of challenges and setbacks, it’s pretty easy for me to look at even the bare bones of a narrative and figure out if it fits the pattern.

            For example…

            By nature of my chosen genre, I tend to read a lot of post-apocalyptic stories and see a lot of those movies.  I’ve read and watched stories set in different climates, different countries, and with different reasons behind the end of the world.  I’ve also seen lots of different types of survivors.  Hands down, the least interesting ones are the uber-prepared ones.  At least a dozen times I’ve seen a main character who decides on page five to turn his or her house into a survival bunker for the thinnest of reasons, filling it with food, weapons, ammunition, and other supplies.  But twenty pages later, when the zombies finally appear…  damn, are they ready.  Utterly, completely ready.

            In other words… there’s no challenge.  There’s no mistakes, no problems, no setbacks.  The plot in most of these stories just drifts along from one incident straight to another, and the fully prepped, fully trained, and fully loaded hero is able to deal with each one with minimal effort.  That’s not a story worth telling, because that story is a line.  And I’m sure you still remember my thoughts on lines…

            On the other hand we have C Dulaney’s series, Roads Less Traveled.  The series begins with The Plan, protagonist Kasey’s careful and precise strategy for surviving the end of civilization.  But almost immediately, the plan starts to go wrong.  One of the key people doesn’t make it, a bunch of unexpected people do, and things spiral rapidly downward.  Challenges and setbacks spring up as the tension goes higher and higher.

            That sound familiar?

            And honestly… that’s all I’ve got for you.  I know I’ve spewed a lot, but I wish I could offer you more.  Y’see, Timmy (yep, it’s another double Y’see, Timmy post), while the other two forms of structure are very logical, dramatic structure relies more on gut feelings and empathy with my reader.  I have to understand how information’s going to be received and interpreted if I’m going to release that information in a way that builds tension.  And that’s a lot harder to teach or explain.  The best I can do is point someone in the right direction, let them gain some experience, and hopefully they’ll figure it out for themselves.

            So here’s a rough map of dramatic structure.  

            Head that way.

            Next week, I’ll probably blab a bit about Watson, the supercomputer.

            Until then… go write.

            I’d thought of making an I Dream of Jeannie joke about this post title, but then I heard that actor Michael Ansara had died and it felt like it might be in poor taste.  He was Barbara Eden’s husband for a while, and even played another genie on the show once.  Of course, he’s really famous for playing Commander Kang, arguably the Klingon (sorry, Michael Dorn), on no less than three different Star Trek shows across more than thirty years, starring in countless westerns, a famous Outer Limits episode, and also for being the voice of Mr. Freeze for the animated Batman and Batman Beyond.  In short… he was awesome and it’s sad that he’s gone.

            However…

            By odd coincidence, one of the first places I heard the phrase “bottle show” was when I was researching screenplays for Star Trek.  A bottle show was what they called an episode that used only existing sets and costumes, and often only the regular cast with minimal (if any) guest stars.  The producers loved them because they saved money, which also made them a great way for aspiring writers to get in.  Write a solid bottle show and they’d buy it just so they could have it handy for emergencies, or to help counterbalance two or three expensive episodes in a row.

            And in a way, a lot of the bottle episodes tended to be better stories.  Once the writers didn’t have the distraction of the “alien of the week,” they could focus their efforts on either bringing out new aspects of their cast or weaving a much more elaborate story.  By limiting what could be done with one aspect of the storytelling, it made all the other aspects that much stronger.

            And that kind of makes sense, doesn’t it?  Unlimited situations don’t have any tension.  If my characters have unlimited time to solve a problem, or have unlimited space to get away from it, my story isn’t going to be very interesting. 

            The thing is, being “in the bottle” could refer to any sort of restriction.  It could be a limited location, yes, like those Star Trek episodes or a good haunted house tale or the classic Campbell story “Who Goes There,” which most of you probably know better as The Thing.  Most of George Romero’s zombie movies are bottle stories, too, with people trapped in a farmhouse, a mall, an underground complex, and so on.

            But it could also be a time limit, that famous ticking clock.  It doesn’t matter what the character does or doesn’t do, the story is ending in two weeks, or two days, or maybe just two hours.  Many of Arthur C. Clarke’s stories involve ticking clocks (often on an astronomical scale, but they’re there)

             Laughable as it may sound, Speed is a bottle story.  The limit is actually the minimum speed the bus could travel.  That’s what created all the tension, because screenwriter Graham Yost came up with a very clever bottle for his story.

            If you’ve having trouble with a story, try sticking it in a bottle.  Rather than trying to make it big and expansive and epic, figure out how it can be tight and restricted and personal.  Slap a limit on it.  Confine your characters to a few locations.  Figure out some way to restrict their time.  Or even just stick to one viewpoint.  If I see and hear everything through Yakko, it means I don’t know what’s going on in Wakko’s head or where Dot was during that blackout.

            As I’ve mentioned before, one of the key elements of any challenge is that it has to be faced.  If I can avoid facing it because of a lack of limits—letting me get away from it, postpone it, or even massively overpower it—then it isn’t really much of a challenge.  And if there isn’t much of a challenge, there isn’t much of a story.

            Next time, I think it’s important that we all admit a few things.