Category: Star Wars

Hello, kiddies! Thanks for tuning in to my latest blog post-mortem!! Hehehehehheheeeee!!

Pop culture again. Ahhh, those were the days…

So, last year at this time I talked about a couple of the subgenres horror can be broken down into. It’s important to know which group your tale of terror sits best with so you know how to approach the different elements and the way they mesh together. Knowing this also helps to sell it and promote it.

By the same token, when you sit down to write something “scary,” it can help to know just what you’re hoping to accomplish. People get their heads cut off in the Saw movies, in Attack of the Clones, in The Man in the Iron Mask, and in A Mighty Heart, but these decapitations are all received in very different ways because of how their particular stories are being told. In the same way, Freddy Kruger has been a slasher, a monster, and a plain old villain, even though the character has barely changed at all. How, exactly, do you intend to scare your readers with this moment as opposed to that one? Or are they supposed to evoke the same kind of fear?

You can nitpick back and forth, but I think fear, as a sensation, generally breaks down into three basic categories. There’s a couple different names people use for them, but for our purposes today, let’s call them the shocker, the gross out, and dread. These three form the food pyramid of fear, if you will, which means using and combining them in the right ways can make a variety of tasty seasonal treats.

…starting to sound like a cooking blog…

Anyway…

The Shocker– This is when something unexpected happens and makes the audience jump. It’s the fear of what’s happening right at this moment. If you’ve ever watched someone read and seen their eyes bug, they probably just hit a shocker. Ever been in a theater when most everyone screams? Same thing. When someone walks around the camp cabin and Jason buries his machete in their skull, that’ll make you jump even watching a movie where you know people are going to get machetes in the skull. When Michael suddenly shoots Ana Lusia on LOST, that’s a shocker, too. Individual shocks can be stretched out a bit–especially on film– with lots of shouting and chaos and a few smaller shocks to keep it going, but really a shock is a short-lived thing.

The shocker is powerful, but it’s important for writers to remember it can’t stand on its own for long. As I’ve mentioned before, a good way to think of shocks is like exclamation points. You can use them! You can use a lot of them!!! But after a while, there needs to be something that actually requires emphasis! If not the shocks will start to lose power and your readers or audience will start to get bored!! Shocks eventually need something solid and lasting to support them.

The Gross-Out – As named by the King himself. It’s when things are just disgusting. This is when the writer’s trying to tap into the reader’s sense of revulsion and maybe even induce some nausea. It’s when we spend two or three pages on someone getting their limbs sawed off or just eating a peanut butter and maggot sandwich, where the little sour-milk colored larva are eating their own paths through the spread before getting crushed against the roof of the mouth by someone’s tongue. The gross out usually differs from the shocker because of duration. While a shock gets weak the longer the writer tries to prolong it, a gross out can actually gain strength as it goes on and on (and thus, torture porn was born). Go too long or too frequently, though, and audiences will get bored with the gross out just like anything else.

An interesting point is that the audience often (but not always) knows the gross out is coming. We don’t linger on it, but it rarely comes out of nowhere.

It’s also worth noting that a lot of gross-out stuff moves closer to dread when it isn’t described at length. Speaking of Stephen King, we all remember the lovely “hobbling” scene in Misery, yes? What’s happening almost takes second place to Annie calmly explaining what she’s doing and why she’s doing it… even in the middle of the procedure.

Dread – This is when something doesn’t happen, but we know it could. It’s fear of potential events, if that makes sense. You could also call this suspense or perhaps terror (if you wanted to nitpick). We’re waiting and waiting because we know something’s going to reach out from under the bed or crawl out of the closet and the fact that it hasn’t yet is giving us the chills. Pennywise the Clown gives us anxiety because we know he isn’t just a clown and it’s very wrong for him to be down in those sewer drains. Hannibal Lecter is creepy just sitting in his cell talking about the things he’s done in the past. And the zombie Julie Walker is kind of hot, but you also know she’s on that razor’s edge of probably eating everyone in the room (and not in the fun way). Dread works well in larger tales because there’s space for eerie backstories, but a good writer can also make it function in tighter spaces.

There’s two catches that come with dread. One is that it relies on the writer having a very solid grasp of how the audience is going to react and what they’re going to know. If I tell you there’s a Strigori knocking at the front door, most of you are going to shrug your shoulders and open up. Likewise, I may find ketchup disturbing, but I shouldn’t assume everyone’s skin is going to crawl at the sight of it. Paint the creepy stuff on too thin or to vague and the audience just won’t get it and they’ll be bored. Paint it to thick and they’ll be angry you assumed they weren’t going to get it. If the shocker is a hammer, suspense is the scalpel of fear.

Tying back to that, dread also relies on the audience having… well, not to sound crass, but it depends on a certain level of intelligence and involvement. If you try explaining climate change to a chimpanzee, you’ll notice they don’t get too worried about it–assuming they sit there for your whole lecture. It makes me sound old, I know, but part of the challenge with dread these days is the shortening of people’s attention spans. If people keep switching channels, walking away, twitting, or texting, they’re not getting involved in the story. Without that involvement, it’s very hard to build a sense of dread.

Also worth noting that dread needs good characters more than the other two types. We need to be able to identify with what a character’s going through. If we can’t, this is a news report, not a story.

Once you know just what you’re trying to do, it’s easy to see how each one works and how they can work with each other. Campfire stories are often little suspense tales that build to a shock in the same way jokes build to a punchline. A lot of the ‘80s slasher films would start with a touch of suspense, jump to shock, and then dive headfirst into the gross-out. Alfred Hitchcock could drag suspense out for ages, but knew a good shock or two could make a film unforgettable.

(mother, please. I’m trying to work on my blog. No mother, it’s not one of those websites, it’s for good people…)

Anyway…

Next time is mostly for the budding screenwriters. Some of you found out last week that you didn’t get one of the 2010 Nicholl Fellowships, yes? I’m willing to bet that no one reading this did, but I’m also sure some of you didn’t try for one. Let’s talk about why you didn’t get one.

Until then, go hand out candy. Oh, and write between trick or treaters.

Every now and then I get to do some really cool stuff for my job at Creative Screenwriting. Part of this is pitching ideas for articles or interviews and the little thrill when someone says yes to a wilder one. What’s really cool, though, is when you pitch a complete long-shot idea and the screenwriter said idea centers around says “sure, let’s grab a coffee or something.”

We’re fostering a couple kittens right now that we rescued from the alley alongside our building. They were Mathilda and Charlie Baltimore for a while, then they hit puberty, certain things developed, and we realized Greystoke and Tarzan might be better names. Then it was Gandalf and Sauroman. We’ve finally settled on Loud Howard and Charlie Gibson.

Bonus points if you know where all those names come from.

The downside is, we ended up with fleas in our apartment. Every time I thought we wiped them out a new wave surged up. I got bit at least once a day. They’re just tiny, annoying things. No one likes a flea.

No, not even the people who run flea circuses. Those things are all fake, anyway.

Do any of you even know what a flea circus is or am I just dating myself again?

Hey, look! The Flea!

Anyway, the thing is, my beloved is reading for a contest right now, and the flea problem made her come up with an analogy. She’d just finished her latest pile, which included (among others) a big cosmic-level story about universe-threatening monsters or something like that and also a more “indy” story about a character who sat and really did nothing while interesting things happened all around her. As my lady love put it, they were stories that focused on the flea on the back of the dog who was chasing the car that the bank robbers were escaping in from their heist.

Let me put it simpler terms. Who’s writing a story set in the modern-day, 2010 United States?

Okay, now how many of you are writing about the health care crisis? The bill passed but there are still arguments and debates and questions and the earliest bits of it won’t begin until next year. It’s a huge issue that affect everyone in this country on one level or another.

Which means it’s affecting your characters. So, who put it in their story? Anyone?

Anyone?

Bueller?

I’m going to go out on a limb and guess not many of you. I’ll step a bit further out and presume you didn’t include it because it wasn’t really relevant to the story you were trying to tell. Which is also why you probably didn’t include a lot about either the war on terror or climate change.

Does the flea have an effect on the bank robbers? Do the bank robbers have an effect on the flea? No, don’t talk to me about the butterfly effect or interconnectedness or any of that nonsense. They’re yes or no question, and if you’re going to be a halfway decent writer you have to be honest about answering them

The point I’m trying to make is that you have to know which story you’re telling. Am I telling the story of the flea, or the story of the bank robbers? Because there does come a point, by sheer sense of scale, that they’re not the same story anymore. In the same way health care or global warming are just too big to have them “casually” in my writing, odds are this phenomenal bank heist is way beyond the life of the flea.

In my experience, this issue comes up a lot in little “art” stories. Writers try to bring in big, complex issues to make their story more “real” and give it “scope” (d’you notice how many of these things I have to keep putting in quotes?). Alas, since the story is really about some introspective naval-gazing these issues are more a distraction that anything else. All they’re doing is wasting words that could be used for better things. This is the story of the flea where someone tries to keep talking about the bank robbery.

This is also why a lot of epic stories tend to fail, just coming at it from the other side. When a writer is focused on creating the most cosmic-level story they can, they generally don’t give the reader anyone to relate to, just people to be in awe of. A story needs a character to be our entry point, and world-changing, epic stories that overwhelm said character are just too big. It’s the story of the bank heist and the audience has all become fleas. One film critic (whose name, I hate to admit, escapes me at the moment) made the clever observation a while back that stories like Star Wars and Lord of the Rings succeeded despite their epic stories, not because of them.

I was going to put some examples of this sort of thing, but the more I thought about it (and kept going over this little rant) the more I realized how hard that would be. This is really just one of those things you get or you don’t. If you’re reading this and think I’ve kind of wasted this week’s rant on the obvious, you probably get it. If you have no idea what I’m talking about, or you’re already composing an angry retort, odds are you don’t. It’s just one of those things that makes sense after processing a given amount of storytelling. I wish I could be clearer about it, but the best I can do is point you in the right direction and give you a rough idea of what you’re feeling around for. One day it’ll all just click. It did for me.

If a story’s going to be small and intimate, then keep it small and intimate. If it’s going to be big, remember to give all us regular folks a gateway into that big story or we’ll just get lost in it. Odds are a manuscript can’t handle being stretched between the two extremes, so writers need to be clear what their story is about.

Next time, I’m going to make things as easy as possible to get through.

Until then, go write.

If you know the show, you get the joke. And the topic of this week’s rant.

Last week I used a certain soon-to-be-ended island castaways show to demonstrate how you can construct a solid mystery, and also some of the common places mysteries go wrong. This week I’d like to look at mystery’s kissing cousin, the twist.

While a mystery is a piece of information the story’s characters are searching for, a twist is when a piece of information is revealed that the characters and the audience didn’t even know was being kept from them. They don’t even suspect this information is out there, waiting to affect the story.

When we discover that Oceanic 815 crashed because of Desmond and the Hatch computer which controls magnetic energy, that’s a twist. Realizing that we’re not watching drunken Jack Shepard in a flashback but in a flash-forward is also a twist. When we learn that John Locke never came back from the dead, he’s been the Smoke Monster all along (or the Man in Black, if you prefer), that’s a great twist. The story–and our own expectations–have been leading us to believe one thing, and it turns out the truth is something else. The key thing to remember is that when a twist is revealed, it should change how we interpret events that have happened in the story so far.

Those are the two points it takes to make a solid twist. The information has to be something the characters and the audience didn’t know. The information has to change how the characters and/or the audience look at past events in the story. That’s pretty much it.

For the record, the twist is probably tied with the mystery as one of the top things fledgling writers try to do and fail. How do they mess this up? Allow me to tell you a little story…

A few years before the ranty blog came into existence, I had the misfortune of working on a really bad, straight-to-DVD sequel to a fairly popular film. The original had a tight, clever mystery story with multiple twists and double crosses. Oddly enough, though, it was far better known for numerous sequences with Denise Richards soaking wet and at various levels of nudity. Go figure.

The sequel I worked on had some of those twists and double crosses, but they weren’t very tight. In fact, when you actually broke down the story… most of them were complete nonsense. The writers had just thrown in tons of “reveals” without seeing if any of them made linear sense. Some of the facts revealed in the course of the story were either already known or could’ve easily been deduced without too much trouble. It was kind of like the big reveal that I have a blog! Yeah, I’ve never said it in so many words, but there it is. Or perhaps you’d be stunned to discover the blog has Amazon links on it!

Yup, all the skeletons are coming out of the closet now.

The revealed information that sequel script kept tossing out also didn’t have any impact on the story. Which, as I mentioned above, is one of the key elements of a twist. It has to change how we interpret the things we’ve read or seen up until this point. If it doesn’t, it’s just pointless information. The sequel’s reveals just kind of… sat there.

Y’see, Timmy, some writers try to push a reveal as a twist when it has no bearing on the story. Would it change the story of LOST to discover Hurley also loves The Last Starfighter? Or that the Dharma folk used the Smoke Monster to frighten children? Would we look at the past two seasons in a new way if we learned Sayid drank for a week straight after Nadia was killed? Odds are none of you knew any of this, so it is revealed information, but none of these revelations twist any of our perceptions of the events or characters. Which is why the writers never tried to make that type of stuff feel like a big revelation.

I’m just making all that stuff up, by the way. I think Hurley is a Star Wars purist.

Now, there’s one more potential catch to a good twist, but this one has a bit more leeway. A twist depends on a certain amount of story coming before it, because it gains power and impact when there’s more story for it to… well, twist. It’s difficult to manage a successful twist in the first ten pages of a manuscript, but a lot of people try to do it anyway.

The first major twist of LOST was, arguably, the reveal that Locke was in a wheelchair before the crash of flight 815, the same wheelchair we’ve seen other survivors using as a cart to move stuff across the beach. I say arguably because there is one before it, but it kind of feeds into what I was saying about needing a certain amount of storytelling ahead of time. In the two hour pilot, there is the brief mystery of who was in the handcuffs. We know somebody on this flight was a prisoner, but who? The logical assumption is Sawyer, which is why we’re all surprised to discover it was small and sometimes squeamish Kate.

This is a twist, yes, but like the quickly-solved mystery this bit of information is revealed so soon it’s almost a regular plot point. Discovering Kate was the federal prisoner forces us to rethink 50 or 60 pages of storytelling, but learning that Locke was in a wheelchair makes us look at almost 200 pages in a new light. It not only forces us to re-evaluate the John Locke we’ve seen up until now, but also the island and the plane crash itself. When it’s revealed that the Smoke Monster is a sentient, thinking creature at odds with Jacob and the Others, that requires us to re-examine all five seasons of the show so far.

Because that’s a big, head-turning twist. The kind that makes people go “Oh, wow…”

Next week, I’d like to focus past all the background noise and talk about another common mistake with overwriting.

Until then, go write.