Category: Star Trek

Pop culture reference. It’s been a while.

So, first up, I have to do that awful self-promotion thing. Sorry. If you don’t want to see me stoop to shameless commercialism, skip ahead to the paragraph after next.

Over on the side bar, you’ll notice a new addition. The Amazon link for Ex-Heroes, my new novel which came out earlier this week. It’s a story about superheroes battling the zombie apocalypse. If you’re into that kind of thing, you’ll have a lot of fun. If you’re not, it might change your mind and you’ll still have fun. If nothing else, you’ll be able to go back over the rant blog here and understand some of the references I’ve made to this book over the past year and a half or so. You can also hop over to Facebook and join my fan page to get updates on various writing projects, interviews, and the like.

See? Told you it was shameless.

Now, back to our regularly scheduled rant about writing…

A few years back I got to speak with a writing coach named Drusilla Campbell She tossed out an interesting little statistic–one I think has probably expanded in recent years. According to her, out of every 100 people who call themselves writers, only one of them will ever actually finish a project.

One out of a hundred. That was five years ago. I’d be tempted to say it’s probably closer to one in 200 these days. What, with the number of people starting serial novels on the web and such.

By an astonishing coincidence, the number of people who succeed at writing is a somewhat smaller percentage than that. According to Drusilla, it was one out of ten of those folks who completed a manuscript. I think that number’s probably shrunk a bit, too, but not by any more than the other one’s expanded. Maybe one out of twenty or so. I don’t have any hard numbers to back it up, but I have a couple of really solid hunches and chains-of-logic I can share if anyone really wants to see them.

As I mentioned above, a lot of people have trouble finishing stuff. More than 99% of the people who like to say they’re writers never do. There are a couple different reasons for this.

The most common one, of course, is real life. We meet someone who demands more of our time. Something unexpected comes up. Work wants a little more out of us. Sometimes it’s just impossible to give writing the commitment it needs

Some people use it as a sort of fail-safe excuse. Until I finish it I can’t submit it or show it to anyone, and as long as no one sees my writing it can’t be rejected or criticized. So, consciously or not, some people come up with various excuses never to finish anything.

And then there are the folks who just thought it would be easy to write. I mean, anyone can write a book, right? It’s not like it’s a skill you have to learn or practice. We all learned how in grade school, fer cripes sake. These folks get a few dozen pages in and discover writing isn’t easy and it does take a commitment. Some give up quietly while others fall back on some excuse. Worse, a few of these folks actually do rush out an ending just to have it, and often get angry when this slipshod conclusion gets criticized.

I joke a lot about Lizard Men from the Center of the Earth, but here’s an ugly truth about it. I never finished it. Yeah, it was written on yellow paper and twenty-three pages is still impressive for a third-grader, but in the end it was never completed. Even when I revisited it in seventh grade and added illustrations and a shovelful of Arthurian legends. I also didn’t finish the cliché-filled sci-fi epic Piece of Eternity, a God-awful fantasy thing I’ve been trying to block for years (we’ll chalk that one up to excess hormones at puberty), my Boba Fett fan-fiction novel (long before there was such a term as fan fiction),or even the college novel I’ve mentioned a few times, The Trinity. Not one of them finished.

By an astonishing coincidence–the same one I mentioned above, in fact–not one of them sold.

The first long-form project I ever finished was a script for Star Trek: Deep Space Nine called “Point of Origin.” It got me fifteen minutes in a room with Ron Moore to pitch story ideas, plus repeated invites to come up and pitch other stories at the Star Trek offices.

The first novel I finished was The Suffering Map. It got several requests from agents. Big agents, as people like to call them.

A large part of my success as a journalist is the editors know they can toss me an assignment and I will finish it on time. The fact that I’m a competent writer is a big part of it, too, of course, but a lot of it is just the simple fact that they know an article that gets assigned to me will get done by the deadline.

Y’see, Timmy, the point I’m trying to make is that no one’s going to be interested in a partial manuscript or a script fragment. You have to finish something in order to achieve any sort of success. Unless your name is King, Rowling, or Brown, you will not sell an idea to anyone. Don’t assume it’s any different in Hollywood, no matter what some vehement film professor–or film student– tells you. I keep track of script sales for a living and the last time I remember hearing of someone selling a raw idea was five years ago, when David Koepp sold his idea for the film Ghost Town. In other words, to the best of my considerable knowledge on the subject, the last time anyone at a film studio bought just an idea it was a small, indie film concept that was coming from one of the top ten money-making screenwriters in the world.

In other words, for the purposes of all of us here at the ranty blog, it doesn’t happen. You will not succeed as a writer until you finish something. It doesn’t matter that you did nine-tenths of the work and you know how it’s going to end, people want to see all of it–especially that spectacular finish.

We have to write. And we have to finish what we write. If we don’t, we’ve got nothing.

Next week, if no one suggests a new topic, there are going to be some cuts.

Until then go write.

If you’ve never heard that term and are grasping for a pop culture reference… don’t bother. I just made it up. The reasons why will soon be as plain as…

Well, you’ll see.

As I’ve said once or thrice before, good dialogue is everything. We learn so much subtle stuff from characters by what they say and how they say it. Does Bob call Cindy his girlfriend or his woman or his old lady? Is she his lover, his ho, his chica, his bitch, his significant other? No matter what their relationship is, the words he uses to describe it tell us something about him.

One term that comes up a lot while reading contest submissions–or writing of any type, really—is on the nose dialogue. I’ve seen it tossed out to beginners numerous times in feedback, but usually without any explanation. It’s the difference between “Why are you always so disrespectful to me in staff meetings, Bob?” and “What the hell’s your problem, anyway?” At its very simplest, what this means is the character (or characters) are saying precisely what they’re thinking with no subtlety to it whatsoever. There’s no inference, no implications, no innuendoes or layered meanings. It’s dialogue stating the obvious, and I’ve mentioned before what a horrible idea it is to state the obvious.

On the nose dialogue usually strips away character, too. When your gangsta drug dealers begin to lament the failed potential of their fallen brethren, they’re not speaking like people who grew up on the street. That’s the writer poking through and trying to tell us something. Often it’s to spew out some character elements or backstory, and it comes out awkward because it’s being forced from the character speaking.

To be clear, there is a difference between on the nose and exposition. While most exposition is on the nose, the reverse is not always true. You can have on the nose dialogue when people talk about their relationship (or someone else’s), the Thai food they had last night, or the movie they want to go see tomorrow.

Here’s a couple things you should be on the lookout for–these are all either common with on the nose dialogue or sure signs you’re avoiding it.

Proper English–I’ve mentioned before the difference between written English and spoken dialogue. When dialogue follows all the rules of grammar it starts to get wooden and lose a lot of its flavor. Sometimes there’s a point to this. One of my own characters in Ex-Heroes, Stealth, is a bit of a grammar Nazi. So is Data on Star Trek (robots and aliens always have great grammar for some reason). For the vast majority of us though, we get a bit loose when we speak. We use contractions and mismatch verbs and numbers. It just happens. When we don’t, dialogue becomes rigid, and that’s just a short shuffle from being wooden.

Characters talking to themselves–Nine times out of ten, if someone’s talking to themselves out loud, it’s on the nose. All those monologues about stress, Yakko psyching himself up, or Dot trying to figure out how to get past the thirteen ninjas to free Wakko… odds are every bit of that is on the nose dialogue.

Telling what’s happening–While it’s never good, on the nose dialogue is a killer in scripts, especially when it takes this route. It’s when characters describe what they’re doing for no real reason. Not when they explain what they’re doing (say, defusing a bomb), but when they’re just saying their actions aloud. Have you ever heard an old radio-show when the actors had to depend on just dialogue with no visuals at all?

“Lamont, is that you? Help me! I’m tied to this chair.”

“Easy, Margot. Just let me get this blindfold off you… there we go.”

“Oh, that’s better. I can see now.”

This kind of clumsy dialogue immediately tells the reader that the writer isn’t picturing this scene visually at all. For screenwriters, this kind of thing is almost guaranteed to get your script tossed in the big pile on the left.

Lack of jargon–The idea of slang has been around for a long time. Bram Stoker talked about it in Dracula 120 years ago, and it’s a safe bet printers had their own special jargon in the workplace less than a decade after Guttenberg made his printing press. Everyone has their own set of words and terms that gets used within their particular group, and these words spill out into most of their conversations. In other words, lawyers speak like lawyers, mechanics talk like mechanics, and sci-fi geeks with no lives talk like Klingons (or Na’Vi, these days, I guess). When these characters lose these basic subtleties, their dialogue starts getting on the nose.

Lack of flirting–It sounds silly, I know, but it’s one to look for. This is a fact of human nature. We show affection for one another. We all flirt with friends and lovers and potential lovers, sometimes even at extremely inopportune times. It’s not always serious, it can take many forms, but that little bit of playfulness and innuendo is present in most casual dialogue exchanges. It’s impossible to flirt with on the nose dialogue because it requires subtlety and implied meanings. If absolutely no one in your story flirts on any level, there might be something to consider there.

Five easy things to look for in your dialogue. They’re not the only ways your words can be on the nose, but they’re the most common, by far.

Next week, I’d like to talk to you about… well, you know. Everybody knows, right?

Until then, go write.

My apologies to all of you regular readers of the ranty blog out there (I think there’s ten of you now). Many deadlines at the magazine these past two weeks, plus apparently I turned old last weekend. These things happen, and I thank you for waiting semi-patiently. Unless something goes horribly wrong, we’ll be back on a regular Thursday schedule for the foreseeable future.

Enough of my lame excuses, though. That’s not what any of us are here for…

So, if you’ve been playing around in the creative fields for any amount of time, you’ve probably heard people talk about concepts. A concept is really just a fancy way of talking about an idea. Alas, it’s now become the standard term in many story-related industries, and you’ll hear far more people talking about concepts than ideas. From a filmmaking point of view, there’s a solid argument to be made that many development people talk about concepts because they don’t have any actual ideas…

But I digress.

Pretty much every story starts with an idea. Stephen King talks about the “What if…” question some writers ask. Hollywood talks about “high concept” ideas where just a few words sum up your whole movie. Not all ideas are good ones, though, and not all ideas work for all types of stories. One problem I’ve seen from many fledgling storytellers is that they don’t understand what kind of idea they have, and this inability to distinguish often leads them down the wrong path.

There are, in my experience, really two kinds of concepts. Unlimited ones and limited ones. You may also have heard them referred to as open and closed stories.

Allow me to explain.

An unlimited concept generally has a very broad scope. The crew of the starship Enterprise is exploring space. The old house up on the hill is haunted. Doctor Who travels through time in his TARDIS. Spider-Man and Batman fight crime to make up for the death of their loved ones. James Bond is a kick-ass secret agent who fights enemies of the British Crown. These ideas are unlimited because you can just keep going and going with them. There are always more idiot college student to wander into the haunted house and more villains to fight Spidey, Batman, Bond, and the Doctor.

However, an unlimited concept is almost never a story. While they can be parts of a story, they tend to be traits for characters or key points about settings. A lot of time when I hear people say “I have a great idea for a story,” they’ve usually come up with an interesting unlimited concept. But there needs to be more to it past that. Which brings us to…

A limited concept. By its very nature, a limited concept can only go so far. It is a bare-bones story, though (more on that below). Richard Kimble wants to find the one-armed man who killed his wife. Robinson Crusoe wants to be rescued from his tropical island, as do the passengers of flight Oceanic 815. Atticus Finch wants to keep his client out of jail, and possibly from a lynch mob. The crew of Voyager wants to find a way across the galaxy and back to the Alpha quadrant.

All of these have straightforward, distinct goals, and once said goal is reached, the story is over. That’s the limiting factor–attaining the specific goal. It doesn’t mean Atticus Finch never tries another case or the Voyager crew doesn’t go into space again, but those would be different stories that have nothing to do with the limited concept we’ve started with.

There are a few common problems with limited concepts. One is when people try to keep pushing the goal away artificially to extend the story (for example, when Dr. Kimble catches the one-armed man only to discover he really needed to find the one-legged man…). Another is when a writer piles on the limited concepts in a single story, creating dozens of goals that need to be achieved. Often this is to make up for a lack of interesting characters or because none of these goals are that challenging. You also see it a lot in genre pieces, where many fledgling writers take the kitchen sink approach to their storyline.

It’s tough for either of these, the unlimited and limited concepts, to work alone. When you can combine these two, though, that’s when you get a solid story. It’s a bit like when I prattled on about horror stories a few months back. You can have a big overall story, but you can still focus on this particular, contained part of it.

–Bond is a kick-ass secret agent (unlimited) who is currently trying to stop the terrorist banker known as LeChiffre (limited).

–The old Marsden Mansion had been haunted for decades (unlimited), and the six people locked inside somehow have to survive until sunrise (limited).

–Batman fights criminals (unlimited) and right now Rhas Al Ghul is threatening to destroy Gotham City with a fear-inducing gas (limited).

Look over all those story ideas you’ve got jotted down (you know you do) and figure out if they’re limited or unlimited. Then figure out which ones work best together. You may have a great short story, screenplay, or novel sitting there, waiting to be noticed. Dissect some of your older work and see what the ideas at the core are.

And then come back here next week, when I shall teach all of you how to dodge bullets. Seriously. Because if you can’t do that… well… you’re not really taking this seriously.

Until then, though, get back to writing.