Category: story

If you’ve been reading the ranty writing blog for a while, you may have picked up that I’m not a big fan of focusing on ART. And I’m even less of a fan of people who start to talk about ART in very lofty terms. Especially when they get dismissive of people who aren’t trying to make ART.

Just to be clear, I’m not talking about art. Writing is an art, yeah, and I’m a big believer in that. I’m referring to those folks who go on and on about the ART of writing. You know the ones I’m talking about. Those people who really believe in the ART over all things.

Now, full disclosure, part of this may be a reaction to a writing TA who berated me in front of the class my junior year of college because I wanted to write, well… fun stories. Stories that entertained people. Said TA basically shredded the story I was working on (a sci-fi horror thing about a government teleportation experiment that went wrong) and told me in no uncertain terms, that if I wasn’t trying to CHANGE PEOPLE’S LIVES with my writing, then I was just WASTING everyone’s time!

Anyway…

As it happens, a year before that fateful class, I’d been studying early American literature and my class discussed Wieland by Charles Brockden 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. Seriously. He was pretty much unknown during his lifetime outside of a small circle (which shrank rapidly after his death) and it wasn’t until the 1920’s that he became semi-known and retroactively entered into the canon of literature.

Well, I decided to be bold and asked my professor about this. Why was the book being considered literature now? I mean, it’d failed back then, barely anyone knew about it today, so how does it qualify? If it was actually great, we wouldn’t need to be told that it was great, we’d already know, right? Why should we consider it relevant now when 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 Brown or Shelly or Lovecraft or Dickinson… the canon changes. A lot of what people refer to as “the classics” now were looked at very differently then. A bunch of them were critical and/or financial failures. A number of them were… well, nowadays some folks would probably call them mass-market tentpole crap. Things written to appeal to the proles. They might’ve made money, yeah, but they weren’t literature.

They definitely weren’t ART.

Now, weirdly enough, at pretty much the same time I questioned my professor about Brown’s book, Robin Williams gave an AP interview and talked a little bit about a theater show he’d done with Steve Martin. “I dread the word ‘art,’” Williams said. “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 Godot so serious.”

Williams understood something a lot of folks can’t wrap their heads around. We can’t make art. No matter how much I try or how long I work or how many guidelines 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 was art suddenly becomes shallow and tired. And the fun, entertaining stuff that stands the test of time? Well, now that’s art. Or maybe not. Seriously, there’s no way to tell.

Y’see, Timmy, art in and of itself doesn’t suck. But I really, truly believe that trying to make art sucks. And usually (not always, but very, very often in my experience), the results of trying to make art suck. I think one of the big reasons why is that if I’m trying to make ART it means I’m trying to make my work fit a bunch of preconceived notions about what art should be. Maybe not even my own notions. Could be someone else’s.

So I end up less concerned with, y’know, creating something and more concerned with following rules and delivering messages. And it feels forced and pretentious. It’s so busy trying to be ART that it doesn’t feel alive.

In the early drafts of GJD, I tried to make art. I tried to convey my message. And I made sure that message got in there. Beat it in there. Hammered it into every little gap so people could see how clever I was. So they could see my beautiful ART.

And—looking back on it, being honest—the early drafts kinda sucked. Weird to think that all the beating didn’t make something great. One character specifically—arguably my protagonist in this ensemble piece—really suffered for it. He was just… well, a jerk. He was obnoxious. Irrationally, unbelievably stubborn. Completely unlikable. To the point that my agent cautiously suggested I might want to do a substantial rewrite.

Which I did. And the book was much, much better for it.

Look, here’s the ugly, simple truth. If I don’t have a good story, ART is irrelevant. Really. Because nobody’s going to know about my ART if nobody reads my story. Nobody walks into a bookstore and says “hey, do you have anything with really powerful symbolism?” If my characters are boring or annoying, it doesn’t matter that I’ve got the most magnificent sentence structure and vocabulary ever committed to paper. Because boring stories and boring characters are… well, they’re boring. And when readers get bored they stop reading. That sounds painfully obvious, I know, but you’d be surprised how many people ignore that in the name of ART.

Last time I ranted about this I mentioned a quote (really a quoted quote) from Star Trek: First Contact. “Don’t try to be a great man—just be a man. Let history make its own judgments.” The same goes for my story. It just has to be a good story. One people want to read. Someone else will decide if it’s art or not.

I just need to focus on writing the best story I can.

Next time, I’d like to talk about reading something for the second time.

Until then, go write.

There’s an idea I heard once or thrice on movie sets. You may have heard it, too. The KISS principle—an acronym for “Keep It Simple, Stupid.” It’s basically a warning to people not to overcomplicate things just for the sake of overcomplicating them. It’s something I’d see a lot in the film industry, usually with less experienced and/ or very stubborn people. The most common example would be directors who tried to do time-consuming, overly complex shots… just so they could do complex shots.

I’d see it in a lot of screenwriting too, especially in the lower budget stuff I tended to work on. The script would be packed with subplots and B-stories and side threads that… didn’t really serve a purpose. If I was in an angrier state that day (and I’ll be honest, I was angry and frustrated a lot when I worked in the film industry) I tended to call it “padding” or “a waste of time.”

Probably the key thing is that more often than not, the final product was uneven. Episodes would have pacing or tone issues. Sometimes they’d just be confusing because the camera was bouncing around for no apparent reason.

And the thing is, a lot of these shots and subplots and random chunks of dialogue weren’t actually bad. It’s just that they weren’t really relevant to what we were doing. I’ve heard a phrase in gardening that a weed is just the right plant in the wrong place. Well in these examples… it was all weeds.

Okay, what’s my point here? Besides making myself grumbly by remembering certain persons and projects and issues…

Allow me to explain. With a sort of follow-up to the explainer, too.

What’s happening here is the storytellers are getting in their own way. F’r example, with the directors, they’re so hung up on telling the story in a clever way (the overly complex shots) that they’re not focused on actually telling the story. Or, in some cases, they’re actually twisting the story to allow for the clever shot.

With the screenwriters, they’d be packing so many subplots or random conversations into a forty-two minute television episode that none of them really got developed in any way. We’d start dealing with one and then have to rush off to deal with another one before people forgot about it. Or the ideas would collide head on, which led to analyzing the story instead of… y’know, enjoying it.

I’ve talked about this problem before—where a plot or story is just overpacked with ideas. And when this happens, the plot will overwhelm the story or the story will smother the plot or sometimes they’ll just collapse into this mess of well… random plot and story points.

This is a tough idea to grasp when you’re starting out, because it just feels wrong and counterintuitive to everything we’ve been led to believe. If the idea’s good, how can it be wrong for a story? I mean, an idea’s good or it’s not, right?

Truth is, I can have a really, really cool idea and sometimes it just doesn’t work in the tale I’m telling. Maybe it doesn’t fit tonally or maybe it slows things down too much or maybe… it just doesn’t fit. If something’s not driving the plot or the story, if it’s pulling us too far off course, or if it’s just filling space I could use for something else… it probably doesn’t belong there.

I’m a big believer in simplicity for, well, a simple reason. And it’s that we’re always going to complicate things. It’s what we do as storytellers. No matter how basic and straightforward a plot is, we’re always going to come up with interesting details and descriptions and clever subplots and little character quirks. And then all that new material inspires some new descriptions and different subplots and suddenly hey, did you know the barista over there was actually Abraham Lincoln in a past life? No, really, she was. It’s a reverse-Zeno’s paradox, where we’re always getting further and further from the end because we’re always discovering new things to flesh out our world and our characters.

Now, granted, yes, some of this is going to get cut. Maybe a lot of it. So on one level it’s easy to say “so what if I decide to do something super complex?” And believe me, I’m a serious fan of wonderfully complex storytelling.

But I’ll point out that when I start complex, I’m not leaving myself a lot of room to explore and grow. If things are dense from the beginning, it’s going to be harder and harder to discover new character facets and justify clever descriptions or go off on little side-stories for a page or three.

Why is that?

Well, that’s my follow-up thing…

If you’ve been doing this for any amount of time, you’ve probably heard someone say something along the lines of “the story is as long as it needs to be.” And to a large extent, this is true. I can make the story whatever it needs to be. Any length at all. Fifty pages long to five hundred pages long. If I need six books to tell this story correctly, then I need six books. That’s how art works.

But…

The rough reality is that there are a lot of limits on how long a story can be.

Let’s put a few feet between us and books for a minute and think about movies again. I think we all agree full-length movies are generally in the ninety minutes to two hours range. It’s just how it is. When a movie’s only seventy-plus minutes… we feel a bit cheated. It can be really good, but we almost always feel like “That’s it? Only seventy-one minutes?” Likewise, when a film stretches out over two and a half hours, it usually feels pretty excessive. There are a few really great three-hour movies out there, but there’s also a lot of really bloated, desperately-in-need-of-editing ones. So no matter how good it is, if my script isn’t in the 90-130 page range… well, I might get some folks to look at it, but not many professionals are going to consider it seriously. It’ll just be one of those “great but unfilmable” screenplays.

And there are lots of reasons for this. How long a movie is will affect how long it takes to make the movie, which will affect how much it costs to make the movie. Plus, longer movies can’t be screened as many times at a theater, which means money’s going to be slower coming back in. And let’s be honest—how many of us have time to watch a really long movie? No matter how good I hear it is, if I see something’s three hours and twenty minutes long… I’m going to be hesitant to sit down. Hell, I friggin’ loved Avengers: Endgame, but I still haven’t even rewatched it at home. I just don’t have the time.

And if I’m talking about publishing… well, there’s a lot of publishing limits. Paper costs money. And shelf space in book stores is precious. Most publishers don’t want to see a massive, beef-slab of a book unless they know they’re going to sell a lot of copies of it. Even if we’re talking about short stories, most markets only have so much room in their magazine or anthology. If someone’s asking me for three-to-six thousand words, I can’t offer them nine thousand and expect to get an acceptance letter.

Now, I’m sure all that makes a few folks eager to talk about the wonderful freedom of self-publishing. But as I’ve mentioned before, self-publishing means I’m the one making the publisher-level financial decisions. A lot of print on demand sources work off page length to calculate costs, and they’ve got very firm price ranges. Just a few pages this way or that can mean a difference of three or four dollars per copy. And somebody’s got to eat that cost. And it’s not going to be the printer. So it’s either me or my readers.

Some of you may recall this is why I had to cut almost 30,000 words out of my original manuscript for 14. It was with a small press, and the publisher just couldn’t afford to have it stretch into the next page-range. That’s all there was to it. Lose 30K words or it doesn’t get published.

Heck, even if I give up on print and just go with epublishing, check the numbers. Shorter books do better as ebooks, especially from self publishers. The vast number of folks who’ve had any degree of success with ebooks are doing it with books under 100,000 words. I think many of them are under 70,000. The “why” of this is a whole ‘nother discussion we could debate for a while, but for now we just need the simple numbers. Ebooks tend to do better as shorter books.

Y’see, Timmy, storytellers have limited space. Those pages are precious. My words are precious. I don’t want to waste them on irrelevant things. I want them to be moving things along for the plot and for my characters. I want the ideas to work for my story, not to be flexing and contorting my story to accommodate some random ideas.

There’s another phrase you’ve probably heard—kill your darlings. This is kinda like that. I may have the sharpest comeback, the neatest way to explain something, or the most fantastic description of a werewolf, but if it doesn’t work in my story…

Well, then it doesn’t work.

And if it doesn’t work, it probably shouldn’t be there.

Next time, unless someone has a question or request, I’m probably going to talk about leftovers.

Until then… go write.

Sorry I missed last week. Was up against a deadline (which I ended up sort of hockey-stopping past anyway). Plus, I feel like… I mean, is it just me, or in a way does it feel like we’re all relearning the internet right now? One of the biggest social media site in the world’s collapsing and people are trying to figure out what to do now. Run to a new social media site? Focus on the personal site? Abandon the internet and start training carrier pigeons on the roof of your apartment building?

That’s how it feels to me, anyway.

But it’s given me time to think about a few things…

I want to bounce an idea off you. Another way to think about plot and story. I’ve talked about these things once or thrice before. To go back to my oft-referenced Shane Black-ism, plot is what happens outside my characters, story is what happens inside my characters.

Today, I’d like to frame this in a different way, though. This idea crossed my mind, and the more I think about it, the more right it sounds and feels. To me, anyway.

Allow me to explain. And we’ll do it the best way possible. With a little story.

Let’s say I decide to lose thirty pounds. As of tomorrow, I exercise more, eat better, maybe cut back on the booze a bit. I do this for five or six months and wow—thirty pounds, gone.

So what’s happened here, from a storytelling point of view?

Well, simply put, I set out to do something and… I did it. It’s technically a plot, but not much of a plot. Not much story either. With no real conflicts or hangups, there isn’t a lot of room for self-discovery. So no real character arc.

Plot is conflict. It’s forcing my characters out of their comfort zones, into these fish-out-of-water sort of situations. And these are the situations where story happens.

So what’s story?

Well, if story’s what goes on inside my character, that would mean a character arc is a change in my character. An alteration of their views. Cowards become brave. The miserly become generous. The self-centered become sympathetic to others. Or vice versa—nobody said character arcs have to be positive. Lots of heroes have become villains, lots of good folks have been pushed to do horrible things.

Put another way, story is why I decided to lose 30 pounds. Did I do it for health reasons? For image reasons?

It’s very easy to have plot without story. Hollywood’s shown us that again and again. Hell, life shows us that all the time. I bet all of us here personally know one or two people who simply will not change their views—they won’t grow or advance in any way—no matter what they see, what they experience, what they do.

I’ve also talked once or thrice about “character-based” books and films, the ones that scoff at the idea of plot in favor of beautiful tales where… well, nothing happens. People sit around and have long talks and then… don’t change. Or they go through some very artificial, forced “growth.”

Thing is, nobody decides to change their views on their own. None of us ever wake up one morning and think “hey, maybe I should completely reverse my views on student loan forgiveness.” Nobody randomly decides to become a serial killer in the shower. We’re influenced by things outside of us. Around us. The people and events we’re exposed to, the things we endure, are what make us see the world in a different light. The external events motivate the internal changes.

Going back to my initial example. So I lost 30 pounds. Why? And why now? Obviously I’d been okay with my physical condition until now, so what made me suddenly decide to drastically cut my weight? Maybe someone died and made me realize I’ve got a lot of unhealthy habits that need to change? Perhaps I finally get to meet that online crush and worried what are they going to think of the real me? Maybe someone died and I realized I needed to become a rooftop-dwelling vigilante who haunts the night. What was it that got me thinking about losing weight?

I think plot tends to be active, but story tends to be a bit more reactive. We actively participate in the plot, but story kinda just… happens to us. We don’t have as much control over it. The reason so many of those artsy tales have poor stories is specifically because they don’t have a plot. There’s nothing new or different happening to encourage that internal change.

Y’see, Timmy, plot is the effect my characters have on the events, but story is the effect the events have on my characters. They push each other along. Like when I walk—pushing off the right foot lets the left foot move forward, pushing off the left foot lets the right foot move forward, and so on. if I try to move with just one foot it can get a little… erratic. And there’s a decent chance I’ll just faceplant.

Anyway, that’s what I’d like you to think about as you poke at your own manuscript. If I’m going to skimp on plot, what’s going to cause those inner changes? Do I have a real story, or is it just a forced, false change of view? And if all I’ve got is plot… why is anyone doing anything? What kind of arc do they have?

Next time…

Look, I’ll be honest. I feel like I’ve been rambling a bit and there hasn’t been a ton of feedback since pulling the ranty blog over here. Is everyone just happy with the rambling? Is no one reading this? Is it more of that online ennui I was talking about up top? Let me know something. Anything. A topic you might like or even one you’re sick of hearing about all the time. And if nobody says anything… maybe I’ll just talk about my trip to Egypt.

Until then, go write.

Okay, now back into it for real.

I haven’t done one of these in a while, so forgive me if I’m a little rambly to start.

There’s a dialogue issue that I’ve seen pop up in books and movies and comics, and it was something I’ve never been able to pin down. It was one of those things where I could tell the story was kind of losing its way, but I couldn’t figure out why. Definitely wouldn’t be able to explain it. What was the common thread? Why did the dialogue go from good (or at least adequate, in some cases) to eye-rolling?

And then, as so often happens in nature, a pterodactyl brought a bundle of enlightenment to my doorstep.

Two months ago I was watching this Saturday geekery movie about a group of women who were getting out of the city for what was supposed to be a bachelorette weekend and had instead turned into a “that cheating bastard didn’t deserve you” weekend. A lot of initial, awkward conversations about was it him, was it me, why didn’t I see it sooner, usually cut off by none of that, let’s drink, look, that park ranger’s checking you out. And then, y’know, pterodactyls attacked. As they do. So now this weekend in the mountains is a battle for survival.

Except…

Every time the women ended up somewhere—in a car, in a cabin, hiding behind a boulder, whatever—the conversation would drift back to was it him, was it me, why didn’t I see it sooner. Long conversations about that relationship, and relationships in general and that cheating bastard. And not, y’know, the pterodactyls stomping across the roof or gathered outside the cave or tearing apart the park ranger on the front lawn. Seriously, this happened again and again and again. Not the park ranger, the conversation thing.

It was then that enlightenment struck.

But first, one quick-but-related segue, since it’s been a while…

An idea I’ve brought up here several times is plot vs story. Plot is external. It’s what’s going on outside my characters. Story is internal. It’s all the things inside my characters that they’re dealing with.

It’s also worth noting that plot is active while story tends to be reactive. Plot is things happening, story is how my characters deal with those things and are shaped by them. My characters respond to events based on who they are, but the outcomes affect how they respond to future events. A fancier term for this is a character arc.

So the story advances the plot while the plot advances the story. When it’s done right it’s a beautiful, symbiotic relationship between the two elements, each one lifting the other to new heights. As all the links in these past few paragraphs imply, it’s something I’ve talked about a few times.

Also—one last bit—you may have heard something like this before but your college literary professor insisted “story” actually refers to the driving narrative of the protagonist as seen through the lens of something. Cool. Whatever. If you want to call these two concepts yin and yang or fabula and sjuzhet or Mirabel and Bruno, that’s all great. Whatever works for you. Don’t get hung up on what we’re calling it and ignore the idea behind it.

Okay, got all that? Cool. Let’s get back to the pterodactyls.

So in the situations I described above, there are clear, active plot events going on, but the characters are using this time to talk about our heroine’s story. Yeah, the park ranger’s being torn apart outside but what if this means I’ll never get married? I mean, so many of my relationships go bad like this. They always have, ever since high school.

And if that made you smile a little bit, the funny part is I’m not exaggerating. That’s exactly how it happened in the movie. That was the actual topic of discussion during that specific event.

Now, granted, it’s an extreme example. And I understand why this particular group of filmmakers did it. To be honest, I’ve seen them do it a lot on a few different projects. They’ve created a plot they can’t actually put on film, for whatever reason, so they’re trying to fill space with all these random deep, emotional, and completely unbelievable conversations.

But I think that’s not why this gear-shift feels so inherently fake. I mean, people talk about weird things at weird times. We laugh at odd moments. We finally remember the thing and blurt it out at a perhaps inappropriate time. There’s nothing wrong with doing it now and then. Although I’m sure the park ranger would appreciate maybe being a little more the center of attention during this difficult time for him.

So here’s my new rule of thumb for you. Not a law, not an ironclad thing that applies to every single situation. But I think it’s a good rule of thumb to keep in mind when characters start giving monologues.

Talking about plot feels honest. Talking about story feels contrived.

It makes sense when characters talk about plot. We accept it. Of course they’ll be talking about the things going on around them, the events that will have an affect on them or other people. This is believable dialogue.

On the flipside, when characters talk about story–when they’re talking more about what’s going on inside them than what’s going on around them–it often feels wrong.. Bringing up all that internal stuff, forcing it out into the world, it tends to feel… well, forced. Unnatural. Especially when none of it relates to current events.

NOW… before anyone rushes angrily to the comments to correct me, toss out an example, and point out how awesome it is when characters talk about their feelings, I’d like to point out two things. One is what I just said a minute ago. This is a rule of thumb. It’s a guideline. All writing advice is iffy at best, and I’m openly telling you this one’s a little more iffy than most.

Second is that, in most our favorite books and movies, when characters are talking about their inner feelings and conflicts, they’re using that wonderful tool we call subtext. Chris isn’t talking about their feelings, ha ha ha, no. They’re talking about the carwash, and how great it’s going to be when the mortgage is paid off and we can all, y’know, work on other things. And if Sam wants to stick around to help run the carwash, I mean, yeah, sure, that’d be, yeah, great. Cool.

Want a solid example? In Spider-Man: Homecoming, when Tony Stark tells Peter Parker to hand over his suit, is Peter actually worried about losing the suit? I mean, he still has his old, homemade one. And the web fluid and the shooters, those are his own design. As we see later, he can still fight crime, just like he did before Stark came knocking. So losing the suit can’t really be that big a deal, right?

Except we all understand this scene isn’t actually about the suit. It’s about Peter being terrified his future is suddenly slipping away from him. He’s a poor, nerdy kid from Queens who had a shot at the big leagues, at having Tony’s approval, of being part of Stark Industries and part of the Avengers, at finally being—in his mind—someone who matters. And suddenly it’s all being taken away.

But Peter doesn’t talk about being scared. He talks about the suit. And how he’ll be nothing without it.

So if I’ve got a character about to deliver a heartfelt monologue about their inner feelings and desires and conflicts… maybe I should pause and look at it again. Yeah, there’s a chance it’s perfect as is. This is one of those cases when someone can flat-out say exactly what they’re feeling with no subtext and it sounds fantastic

But maybe—especially if I’m doing this two or three or four times—it’d be better if a lot of it was implied rather than explicitly said. Maybe I could bring it out it with some plot-relevant subtext. Or maybe I could show it with their actions and decisions. Story advancing the plot and all that.

Because it just makes people uncomfortable when we talk about that stuff.

Next time, unless anyone has some other suggestions, I thought I’d blather on a bit about that other type of structure.

Until then… go write.

(wow, haven’t said that in a while)