Category: story

There is no pop culture reference this week. There’s a good one on the tip of my tongue, but I can’t get it. So I just went with this.

Anyway, let me tell you things I like in stories, and a few I don’t.

I like casual dialogue, but I really dislike it when it descends into jargon or affected accents. I like exotic settings, but not alien, unrelatable ones. I like action and maybe a bit of a mystery or puzzle. I love a good twist. I prefer that the sex and violence be a bit more implied and bit less graphic. I enjoy seeing a smaller story set against a broader canvas. I like writers who use the scalpel over the sledgehammer and don’t feel the need to sink to the lowest common denominator. I love smart humor and subtle wit. I’m not much on romance novels, get really bored by inner-city “gangsta” films, and I despise pretentious material, but past that I read in almost every genre, even westerns.

What does all this have to do with your writing?

Absolutely nothing.

Seriously. Doesn’t mean a damned thing.

A bad habit most of us have when we give criticism is to mistake what we like personally in a book or film with actual corrections that need to be made. If someone gives me a story loaded with explicit violence and sex, it may not be to my taste but that doesn’t mean they’ve done anything wrong. I didn’t see the point to any of the Hostel or Saw movies, but in and of itself that doesn’t mean the writers were off course. These franchises have brought in several hundred million dollars, so it’s clear they appeal to quite a few people.

A far worse habit, though–the one a fair amount of fledgling writers fall into– is to accept those likes and dislikes as valid criticism. A lot of folks don’t have the confidence or experience to sift out the useful comments (“You switch tenses here and here. And you spelled misspelled wrong.”) from the more personal and subjective ones some people give (“Zombies are overdone. You should make them all Frankenstein monsters.”)

A few random examples…

I’ve mentioned my college attempt at a novel, The Suffering Map, once or thrice. Started in college, finished almost exactly ten years later. Once it was done, I showed it too a few friends and associates. Most were fairly positive with a few notes here and there. Another could have even been called pretty enthusiastic.

One, though, probably burned through two or three red pens. As he saw it, there were some major flaws in the story. The biggest was that Miguel, a former gang member, didn’t go running back to his gang for protection when things started getting scary. Later on, when things were full-on dangerous, he should have a dozen gang members with him, because he should’ve gone back earlier when things were getting scary. As I read on through his notes, it became clear that my friend had a very different idea of what direction my story should’ve gone in. What the story was didn’t interest him at all–he was critiquing it based off what it thought it should be. The further I read, the harsher his comments got because the story was (as he saw it) going more and more off track. About twenty or so pages before the end he scribbled a note that he’d stopped reading because I’d just gotten everything wrong.

Story the second…

A friend of mine was visiting L.A. a while back to pitch a screenplay he’d been working on. It was a dark crime drama that aimed very high. The mysteries unfolded slowly and some weren’t fully spelled out for the audience. Some motives remained murky. In the draft he showed me, even the end was a bit vague (although I think he tightened it up later). A very nice story, but definitely not one for the mass market.

I tossed out the idea of a frame. Perhaps the film could begin at the climactic stand-off moment, the hero’s decision, then jump back to “three days earlier” to show us the events that led up to that stand off. It would begin with a bang (a bruised and battered man held at gunpoint and told to make a choice) to draw the audience in, then settle down to tell the story once they had that hook in their mouths, so to speak.

He considered it overnight and told me the next day that he’d decided against the frame. He had his story and he didn’t want to change how it was being told. If someone didn’t like it–no big deal. Odds are there’d be someone else who would. I agreed with him and that was it–we moved on to talking about a series of magazine articles I’d been working on.

And if I wanted to open a real can of worms, I could bring up LOST as story the third and talk about the fair share of people who didn’t like the ending. But we’d probably end up getting sidetracked into time-travel debates and mysteries vs. resolutions and stuff like that. So I’ll plant that seed in your mind, but we won’t go there…

Y’see, Timmy, at the end of the day, you’re the one writing the story. Just because someone doesn’t like it doesn’t mean that it’s wrong. You need to be telling the story you want to tell.

Now, I know this may sound a bit contradictory to some things I’ve said before, but it isn’t. There’s a bunch of stuff you must do a certain way in your writing, and you must get these thing right. Things like spelling, grammar, believable characters, logical structure, and so on.

However, the writing process is entirely your choice. You don’t have to outline or notecard or write beat sheets or anything if you don’t want to. Feel free to start on page one with no clue what’s going to happen at the end of your story. How you write is up to you.

Likewise, what you choose to write about is your choice. And no matter what anyone tries to tell you, your choice can’t be wrong because… well… it’s your choice. You can’t be wrong for wanting to write about zombies or gothic romances or investment bankers any more than I can be wrong for liking Almond Joy bars, pizza, and the end of LOST.

Keep in mind, I’m still not saying anyone will want to buy your story. Or even read it. Being true to your vision does not always and immediately equate to a contract and money in the bank. Heck, there’s always that chance your story could be complete crap (God knows some of mine have been). But it’s still your story. If you’re trying to meet someone else’s expectations and desires, your writing is going to feel forced and fake.

And yes, it will show.

Next time, I’d like to speak with you about communicating via interlobal trans-psion pulses, if Grolthaxia is willing.

Until then, go write.

There’s a phrase that gets tossed around a lot in Hollywood, usually by directors, actors, and producers. It’s kind of insulting and condescending the way it gets used, but there is a degree of truth to it. That phrase is…

The script is just a blueprint.

Now, the reason I say that’s condescending is because this gets used by directors who want to justify rewriting scenes and actors who want to justify changing (or just making up) lines. We’d never say the director’s just there to block out the scene or the actor’s just supposed to read the dialogue, but for some reason it’s acceptable to say the writer is just a stepping stone for everyone else’s brilliance.

Here’s my take on this. There are numerous stories in Hollywood of brilliant scripts that became average-to-sub-par movies when the director and actors were done with them. Pay It Forward. Excess Baggage. Wanted. Little Monsters. Heck, even Suburban Commando. Yeah, you’re cringing, but have you ever read the original screenplays for any of these films? The ones that sold and got the project greenlit? Most of them were damned entertaining, and one or two of them were just phenomenal. Who do you think’s responsible for the movies that came out of these scripts? The key grip? The wardrobe supervisor? Heck, the writer of one recently released film confided to me that the whole reason the movie went through numerous expensive reshoots was because the director had made “a few changes” during the original shoot which destroyed the character arcs for both protagonists (much to the frustration of both the screenwriter and the producers).

Now, to be fair, how often have you heard of a brilliant director and great actors being saddled with a sub-par script which sank their film? A few times for that, too, right?

Riddle me this, though, Timmy– if the script was sub-par, why did they decide to go into production with it?

Doesn’t make sense, does it? No one’s going to build a house if the blueprints don’t include a foundation, a front door, or a staircase to the second floor. Considering how much more a motion picture costs than a house, does anyone here really believe a studio would march into production with a crap script? That a director would agree to work on it? That actors would rush to be in it?

Unless, of course, those people don’t know what they’re doing, either…

But I digress…

As I said up above, there is some truth to the script as a blueprint analogy. No matter what Hollywood and auteur wankers like to say, the screenwriter is the architect of the movie. They’re the one who sits down with a vision and an idea that gets committed to paper and referred to throughout the construction process. Even if the film is an adaptation or a remake, it’s the writer who has to plan it all out and decide what to keep and what to discard. There’s a reason the architect said put the door here, the window there, and the support beam right there. A screenplay is a blueprint, and when you don’t follow the blueprints–or don’t know how to read them– you get cracks, crumbling, and sometimes a full-on collapse.

However…

(Yeah, there’s a however. If there wasn’t you wouldn’t need to read any of this,would you?)

This does not mean the screenwriter is the end-all, be-all of the process. A good architect knows there’s a lot of stuff he or she gets to shape and insist on, but just as many that they have no control over. Frank Lloyd Wright designed some of the most beautiful structures in the world, but he didn’t have a say on the appliances in the kitchen, the living room carpet, or what the owners decided to use for bedlinen. There’s a point the architect has absolute control, but there’s also a point where the blueprints have to get handed over to the contractor, the painter, and the interior decorator. Not to mention the people who are buying the house. Heck, if the architect gets hired to design a beach house and they turned in plans for a Victorian office building, it doesn’t matter how good that office building is, they’re not getting another job.

Let’s stick with this metaphor for a few more paragraphs. Imagine you hired an architect to design your new house and the first two pages of the plans are an explanation of how the building may look odd but is actually modelled after the house the architect lived in as a child. That house was built by his great-uncle who had fought in World War Two and returned home to Boston afterwards to build a home that resembled the structures he’d seen while fighting in the Pacific Rim. None of this has anything to do with your house, granted, but the architect felt it was worth mentioning. And eating up two pages of blueprints with.

How are the carpenters going to react when they see that half of every page is instructions on how to use a circular saw, lists of preferred nails, and step-by-step guides for using a measuring tape? There’s an extra 50 pages worth of blueprints here telling everyone on the construction crew how to do their jobs–jobs that more often than not the architect doesn’t know how to do himself. How far in will everyone get before they start ignoring everything the architect’s written alongside the diagrams? And then what happens when there finally is something important in all those notes?

Anyone who’s ever taken drafting knows how important clean lines are. If the architect’s cluttered every diagram up by drawing in wood grains or micromanaging every stud and strut, it just get confusing. We don’t need to see all those individual nails, but we do need to see that load-bearing beam and it’s getting lost in the glut of useless detail. A good foreman knows there needs to be a load-bearing beam somewhere in this wall, and if he can’t find it in the blueprints he’ll just put it in himself. If that messes up plans for the second floor fireplace… ah, well.

One of the biggest mistakes beginners make with screenplays is not understanding what a screenplay is. It’s not an exhaustive list of instructions for the director and the crew. It isn’t a magical tool for making actors do and say certain precise things. It’s not a chance to dazzle people with high-falutin’ vocabulary or hyper-detailed imagery. It’s a framework.

A screenplay–a good screenplay– is the underlying structure of a film. It’s the solid framework everything else is built on. It’s careful balancing act of minimal, concise language that’s got to have as much punch and nuance to it as humanly possible. It isn’t choked with excess verbiage or screen directions in the same way the plans for a house don’t list china patterns and carpet selections.

It is the blueprint of the film.

Just not in that insulting, condescending way those other folks say it.

Next time, I’d like to talk about something that lifts and supports.

No, not that. You can find that lots of other places online.

Until next week, go write.

Easy geek reference up there for you.

So, this week’s little rant is sliding in under the wire. To be honest, I’ve been buried under a ton of last-minute stuff for work. Plus the holidays. Plus some family stuff. I can’t be expected to keep up on all of it.

Well, that’s not true. It’s a bit of a cop-out, really. If I’d managed my time a bit better a lot of this would’ve been done on time. There were even two or three times this week I remember thinking “I need to start working on this week’s ranty blog post.”

Cop-outs suck, don’t they? You’ve made an investment in some piece of writing and then wham! Out of nowhere the writer just does something lame. They’ll change the rules or deliberately ignore continuity and just try to bluff their way through. Epic stories that don’t deliver. Mysteries that aren’t explained. Ominous foreshadowing that never pays off. All of these are cop-outs.

The very first story I can ever remember telling had a cop-out ending. I was about eight years old, it was summer, and Mom had taken us to the beach even though I wasn’t feeling well. Somehow I ended up sitting with the father of my friend Todd, while everyone else played in the water, and I spent the time regaling him with the epic tale of G.I. Joe fighting off the Intruders.

For those of you born after 1980, G.I. Joe used to be just shy of a foot tall and had fuzzy hair. You could even shave him. He was also firmly grounded in the real-world military. When Star Wars shifted the toy paradigm to science fiction, GI Joe suddenly gained a bunch of new friends, like the superhero Bulletman and the cyborg Mike Power. And enemies called the Intruders which were a race of alien bodybuilder midgets who wore metal leotards… sort of…

Anyway, on with the story.

You see, the Intruders came down in asteroids. And they all crash-landed at GI Joe’s secret base. There were lots and lots and lots of them. In fact, there were a million of them. So GI Joe was shooting at them with his gun and he shot ten of them, and Mike Power was kicking with his bionic leg–

(Mike Power had one bionic leg. Just one. Even at the age of eight, I could see the gigantic flaws in this bit of cybernetic engineering.)

–and Bulletman used his ray to lift a bunch of them into the air and send them away. This pattern of violence was repeated enthusiastically twice or thrice before I declared all the Intruders defeated.

Not so, Todd’s father told me. A million is a lot.

I conceded this, and explained that the above mentioned pattern of gun-kick-ray happened again. So now they were all gone.

No, he said with a smile and a shake of his head, a million means there’s a lot more left.

I nodded, then said that Bulletman had used his ray to scoop up everyone who was left and send them away.

It seemed like a very solid ending at the time.

Granted, it’s easy to excuse an ending like that from an eight year old, but far too many adults use them, too. Except for poor spelling, there isn’t a much more glaring sign of poor writing than a plot thread that winds up with a cop-out. It shows the writer didn’t think things out, or just couldn’t be bothered to.

A few common types of cop-outs.

Changing the rules–While it completely fits the story it’s told in, the title reference of this little rant is a perfect example of changing the rules. In the midst of this serious contest of life and death, we find out it wasn’t a fair contest. We’ve been told within the story that X + Y = Z, but the writer suddenly announces X + Y can also equal Q. This usually comes about because the story has been written into a corner and the writer won’t take the time to go back and change things (when the ancient Greeks did this, they called their cop-out deus ex machina). As Billy Wilder once observed, a problem in your third act is really a problem in your first act.

Changing the rules is inconsistent and it breaks the flow. William Goldman used it for comedic effect in The Princess Bride, but it’s doomed to almost certain failure in anything except a comedy. Heck, thanks to Goldman it’s going to look pretty tired in a comedy, too…

The so-called twist–This is a more specific type of changing the rules. I’ve set out the rules for a good twist before, and they’re pretty simple for anyone to figure out. That’s why it’s so frustrating when a writer has Debbie pull off her wig and announce “Hah!! I’m really Larry’s second-cousin!!!” This is often followed by flipping through pages to figure out who Larry is and why his second cousin would have it in for everybody.

Usually a poor twist tries to solve one problem in the story at the expense of the story itself. A weak twist isn’t just a cop-out for a plot thread, it’s almost a guarantee the manuscript will end up in the large pile on the left.

No payoff –Few things are as annoying then to go through a story waiting to see the two enemies clash or to learn the answer to the mysterious puzzle that’s plagued out heroes… only to not get it. The enemy gets away. The mystery gets skirted over. It just leaves the reader feeling cheated.

Sometimes it’s not even a question that’s not answered, it’s just a payoff that never happens. When the climactic, world-altering final battle occurs off-camera and we just see the characters talking afterward about how amazing it was, that’s a cop-out.

Just plain weak–– Sometimes when a writer uses a cop-out, they’re just choosing the path of least resistance. It’s quick and easy and wraps stuff up. Oh, he was dreaming and she was insane. Sometimes an ending can seem solid, but it’s still weak because of the promise of something bigger. A worldwide alien invasion is awesome. A worldwide invasion where the aliens can be defeated by tap water… not so much. Remember, a story can be weak by inclusion just as much as by omission.

And there you have it. I’d put more, but, as I mentioned before, I have a lot of work to do still.

Plus, I’m really Larry’s third cousin.

Still open to suggestions as we head into the holidays. If not, next time I’ll end up blathering about women I’ve dated or something.

Until then, go write. At least your Christmas cards.

It’s like a radio–a radio tuned to the frequency of evil!

If you get that reference… God, I pity you.

So, I’ve talked about different genre issues here a few times before. With the upcoming holiday, though, I thought it would be nice to pause and talk about one that’s near and dear to me.

To be honest, I wasn’t always into horror. As I noted on a friend’s website recently, it wasn’t until my college years that I really embraced the many forms of the genre. Before that, I was terrified of more things than we’ve got room to list. Yet I eventually hit the point that I started selling original horror stories of my own and was even asked to become a dark god and crush the hopes and dreams of mortals.

But that’s a story for another time…

The different forms of horror is what I really wanted to talk about in this week’s little rant, though. Anyone who’s dabbled in the genre knows that, alas, when you tell folks this is your field you tend to get lumped into this vague slasher/ vampire/ Satanist category. Either that or earmarked as someone working through childhood issues. Most folks don’t realize horror can be broken down into many different sub-genres, just like comedy, drama, or other art forms like painting. Being under the same umbrella of “horror” doesn’t mean Dracula is anything like Hostel, and neither of them resembles Resident Evil. As a wise man once said “I am nothing like Family Guy!!”

The catch here (and there’s always a catch, or you wouldn’t be bothering to read any of this, would you?) is that a lot of fledgling writers aren’t sure where their stories fit under the umbrella, either. They’ll start off with the trappings of one sub-genre, move into a plot more fitting a different one, wrap up with an ending that belongs on a third, and have the tone of yet another through the whole thing. They have a specific name for this problem. It’s called Plan 9 From Outer Space.

It’s important to know just what you’re writing, for two different reasons. One is so you’ll be true to it and don’t end up with a sprawling story that covers everything and goes nowhere. You don’t want your slasher pic to degenerate into torture porn, and if you’re aiming for cosmic-level evil it’d be depressing to find all the earmarks and resolutions of a common supernatural story. You also want to be able to market your story, which means you need to know what it is. If you tell an editor it’s not torture porn when it plainly is, at the best you’re going to get rejected. At the worst, they’ll remember you as “that idiot” when your next piece of work crosses their desk.

So, here’s a few different panels of that umbrella. Some of them are established sub-genres which have already been debated to death. Others are just things I’ve noticed on my own that I feel are worth mentioning. Use them a lot and maybe they’ll enter the lexicon.

Supernatural stories

This is one of the easiest ones to spot. It’s your classic ghost story. The phone lines that fall into the cemetery. The girl out hitchhiking alone in the middle of night. The mother who wishes on a monkey’s paw that her dead son would come home.

There are a few key things you’ll notice about these. One of the biggies is that the protagonist rarely comes to harm in a supernatural story. Their underwear will need to go through the wash three or four times and they may not sleep well for years afterwards, but physically, and even mentally, they tend to come out okay. If anyone suffers in a supernatural story it’s usually the bad guy or some smaller character. Also, these stories tend not to have explanations– they just are. There aren’t any cursed objects or ancient histories at play. Things happen because… well, they happen.

Even with it’s clever twist, The Sixth Sense is still a great example of a supernatural story, as is “The Signalman” and “A Christmas Carol,” both by that populist hack Charles Dickens.

Giant Evil stories

These are the grim tales when the universe itself is against you. Every person you meet, every thing they do–it all serves some greater, awful evil. H.P. Lovecraft and Robert Howard wrote a lot of giant evil stories. The Omen is another good (so to speak) story of the universe turning against the protagonist. And any fan of Sutter Cane will of course remember the reality-twisting film In The Mouth of Madness.

Personally, I would toss a lot of haunted house stories in here, because the haunted house (or ship, or insane asylum, or spaceship, or whatever) is essentially the universe of the story. Not all of them, but a decent number. The reader or audience doesn’t see anything else and the characters don’t get to interact with anything else. The Haunting of Hill House, The Shining, and Event Horizon could all be seen as supernatural stories, but their settings really elevate them to giant evil stories.

Thrillers

Thrillers also stand a bit away from the pack because they tend to be the most grounded of horror stories. No creatures of the night, no dark entities, far fewer axe-wielding psychopaths. The key thing to remember is that a thriller isn’t so much about what happens as about what could happen. It’s more about the ticking clock, the killer hiding in the closet, or the booby trap that’s a razor-width from going off and doing… well, awful things to our characters. There’s a lot of suspense focused on one or two characters and it stays focused on that one character for the run of your story. A thriller keeps the characters (and the reader) on edge almost every minute.

Alfred Hitchcock was really the master of thrillers, although much of his work came from other sources. How many folks have actually read Robert Bloch’s Psycho, for example? Silence of the Lambs is another great thriller, both the book and the film.

Slasher stories

Slasher stories are really about one thing, and that’s the body count. How many men, women, and fornicating teens can the killer reduce to cold meat? Note that there’s a few distinctions between a slasher story and a torture porn story (see below), and one of them is usually the sheer number of people killed. There’s also often a degree of creativity and violence to the deaths, although it’s important to note it’s rarely deliberate or malicious. Often it’s just the killer using the most convenient tools at hand for the job. The original Friday the 13th film series has pretty much become the standard for slasher pics, and it’s what most people tend to think of first when you mention the term..

A lot slasher stories used to have a mystery sub-element to them, and often it was trying to figure out who the killer is. These days it’s more often a twist, and often not a very well-done one. You’d’ve never guessed she was the killer, would you? And the reason you never guessed was because she has no motivation, there was no foreshadowing, and it makes no sense whatsoever within the established story. Slasher films, especially, developed a bad habit of falling back on the insanity defense and got stereotyped as “psycho-killer” movies. Which is a shame because some of them are actually very clever and creepy.

Monster stories

The tales in this little sub-genre tend to be about unstoppable, inescapable things that mean the protagonist harm. They’re rarely secretive or mysterious, but they do have an alarming habit of tending toward unkillabillity (new word, just coined, take that Shakespeare). The emphasis here is that nothing your heroes (or the villains, police, military, or the innocent bystanders) do can end this thing’s rampage, and any worthwhile rampage tends to involve people dying. There may be blood and death, but the focus with a monster isn’t finding it or learning about it– it’s stopping it or at least getting as far away from it as possible. Of course, how far is far enough with something that doesn’t stop?

The original monster story is, of course, Frankenstein. Godzilla is a monster, in a very obvious sense, but so are zombies and even Freddy Kruger. I still hold that the reason Jason X is so reviled by fans of the franchise is that the filmmakers turned it into a monster movie, not a slasher film like the ones before it.

Adventure Horror stories

To paraphrase from Hellboy (which would also fit in this category), adventure horror is where the good guys bump back. While they may use a lot of tropes from some of the other subgenres, the key element to these stories is that the heroes are fighting back. Not in a weak, flailing, shrieking cheerleader way, but in a trained, heavily-armed, we’ve-got-your-number way. Oh, it can still go exceptionally bad for them (and often does), but this sub-genre is about protagonists who get to inflict a bit of damage and live to tell the tale. For a while, anyway. To quote an even wiser man, even monsters have nightmares. Or bothersome irritations, at the least.

Brian Lumley’s Titus Crow novellas are a great example of adventure horror stories that are set in the world of Lovecraft’s Cthulhu mythos, as is the short story “Blood Bags and Tentacles,” by D.L. Snell. The Resident Evil franchise is horror adventure with zombies, just like my own Ex-Heroes. Some of you may have seen Dog Soldiers, and several of you have probably seen Army of Darkness.

Torture porn

Paul Verhoven once commented that the reason Murphy is killed so brutally in the beginning of Robocop was because there wasn’t time at the start of the film to develop him as a character. So they gave him a horribly gruesome death, knowing it would create instant sympathy for the character, and then they’d be able to fill in more details about his life later on in the film. That’s the general idea behind torture porn. Minus the filling in more details about the characters later.

I’m not sure if Stephen King himself actually coined the term “torture porn” in his Entertainment Weekly column, but that’s the first place I remember seeing it. Before then, I was referring to these as “uncomfortable stories.” Torture porn, at its simplest, is about making the reader or the audience squirm. If you can make them physically ill, power to you. The victims are usually underdeveloped, unmemorable, and doomed from the moment they’re introduced. It’s not about characters, it’s about the visceral things being done to the characters. They’re getting skinned, scalped, boiled, slowly impaled, vivisected… and we’re getting every gory detail of it. As I mentioned last week, porn is when you show everything and this sub-genre is about leaving nothing to the imagination. They are the anti-thriller, to put it simply. This is where you’ll find the Saw and Hostel films, and many of Rob Zombie’s movies.

A key element to torture porn is the victim is almost always helpless. They’re bound, drugged, completely alone or vastly outnumbered. Unlike a slasher film– where there’s always that sense that Bambi or Candi might escape if they just run a little faster or make a bit less noise– there is no question in these stories that the victim is not going to get away. That hope isn’t here, because that’s not what these stories are about.

In closing, I’ll also toss in the free observation that it’s very difficult to merge two of these subgenres because a lot of them contradict each other by their very nature. Not impossible, mind you, but very difficult. If you remember the jumble that was Freddy vs. Jason, a big part of the problem there was as the script stumbled back and forth between a monster movie (when it focused on Freddy) and a slasher film (when Jason was on screen). You can’t have a film that focuses on chopping up teens one moment and just terrorizing them the next. It’s also why the film stabilized a bit, tone-wise, in the second half when it settled into a straight out monster-mash.

So, that’s enough of that. Feel free to dwell on these points while you’re munching on the ill-gotten gains you scored via your candy beard. Yeah, all of you with kids, you know what I’m talking about…

Happy Halloween. Don’t forget to get some writing done.