Category: structure

Happy Halloween, everyone! Hope you’re all prepared for tonight. And may the gods have mercy on those of you who aren’t…

Let’s talk about scary movies for a moment.

If you aren’t familiar, there was a long-running movie series called Resident Evil based off the long running game series of the same name, which also spawned a series of animated movies. But we’re talking about the live action ones. Well, the original live-action ones.

Specifically, I’d like to talk with you about the first one, written and directed by Paul W.S. Anderson. Rather than base the movie directly off the game story, Anderson decided to use lots of elements from the game with all-new characters. This gave him a lot more freedom in how he told the story, and let him structure the film for a general audience instead of specifically for fans of the game.

That structure is what I wanted to talk about. If you’ve been following the ranty writing blog for a while, you know I love pointing out how well this movie uses flashbacks. Seriously, it’s amazing. The movie’s pretty much a masterclass in how to do flashbacks well in a story. They all serve a clear purpose. They all advance either the plot or the story (often both). They all fit within the narrative and linear structure of the story. And none of them create fake-tension situations that are undermined by the present. You can read more about my rules-of-thumb for flashbacks right here, if you like.

So I figured, since it’s Halloween and all, I’d walk through these flashbacks one by one and show you how and why they’re so effective.

Now, you’re going to get a lot more out of this little rant if you’ve seen the movie. I highly recommend checking it out. It’s seasonal, it’s fun, it’s much more of an action-horror film than a gorefest. I don’t know if it’s streaming free anywhere, but I think you can rent it most places for three or four bucks? Also, kind of goes without saying but there are going to be some unavoidable spoilers in this discussion so… be warned.

Here’s a brief refresher for those of you who haven’t seen it in a while (or are just determined to go on without seeing it)…

Resident Evil begins with a few quick minutes showing the lab accident that kicks off everything before the lab goes into a drastic lockdown mode that seems to kill, well, everyone. And after that we’re with our heroine, Alice, who wakes up naked and wet on the floor of a bathroom, half-draped in a shower curtain and suffering from near-complete amnesia. Very quickly she learns she’s part of a security detail guarding a hidden entrance to the Hive, a massive underground lab/ testing facility operated by the multinational, multibillion dollar Umbrella Corporation. And the lab accident earlier has set a very nasty bioweapon loose down there, the T-virus, which has had, politely, some effects on the researchers and other staff members.

And we’ll stop there for now.

So let’s talk flashbacks. I’ll try to go over all of them and give you a little context for each one. I’m also going to mention where they are so if you’re actually doing your homework, you can skim around in the movie and find them.

Our first one shows up a little over nine minutes in. Alice has woken up, staggered to the bathroom mirror, and is staring at her reflection when this flashback kicks in for a few seconds. She was in the shower, there was a vent, her eyes rolled up, and she collapsed, dragging the shower curtain down with her.

So this first one does a few things. It tells us right up front Alice didn’t pass out she was knocked out—this is something that was done to her, not something that just happened. It also establishes her flashbacks are very distinct from the “present’ story line in the movie—they’re in overexposed black and white, with echoey sound and a fast cut, glitchyquality that helps sell her fragmented memory. And it fits story-wise. This is something she’s focused on and trying to remember, so it makes sense we’re seeing this and not, y’know, last night’s dinner or something.

Also worth noting Alice’s reactions after this flashback because it’s very clear this is all the information she got from this sparked memory. She still doesn’t know who or where she is, or what’s going on. This is going to hold for all the flashbacks—she doesn’t get anything “extra” out of them. She sees what we see.

Our next flashback comes at eighteen minutes in. Alice has been taken with the security team to the underground train that leads to the Hive, and they’ve found an unconscious man on board. Alice stares at the man’s face and flashes back to her and him together and happy. Again, just quick flashes. Her in a gown, him in a tux, laughing, posing for photos together.

Worth noting that Alice had also seen a wedding photo of her and said man a few minutes earlier, and this flashback pretty much explains where that photo came from. It also connects the two for the audience—the man here now on the floor of the train (we’ll learn his name is Spence and he’s also suffering from gas-induced amnesia) is the man we saw earlier in photos. Whoever he is, Alice has a definite history with him.

Which brings us to the third flashback. Maybe 22 minutes in now. It’s mostly a recap of the first one as the security team commander explains what’s actually going on here and gets everyone up to speed. So as he’s explaining the computerized security systems and known side effects of the gas (short-term amnesia), we see Alice get gassed in the shower again—this time with an extra few shots to show us how the vents are hidden away in the walls.

So this one’s a little more structural—it’s a quick reminder for the audience. It emphasizes things are run by the computer (some of you know where that’s going). It’s giving us a bit more information about how thing are hidden and automated in Umbrella facilities.

Our fourth flashback happens three or four minutes later (just shy of 26 minutes in). We’re in the Hive now, and Spence offers Alice his leather jacket to keep warm. It’s the first time they’ve actually touched and it sets off a bunch of memories for Alice. Really specific ones showing she and Spence knew each other. Like, y’know… knew each other. Physically. As was the style at the time.

And that means now Alice knows something about Spence. He’s clearly someone she has a history with, and a history that involved, well, a degree of sharing and trust between them. As always, she doesn’t remember anything else, but it’s enough that she clearly decides he’s someone she can trust.

Notice the pattern here so far. All four of these flashbacks barely add up to fifteen seconds. They’re not slowing anything down. They’re all related to the actual events going on and the information the movie’s giving us (and Alice). And every one of them tells us something new—there’s very, very little noise. They all keep advancing out knowledge of the plot or the characters.

The next flashback doesn’t happen for almost half an hour—there’s a lot of action going on and dropping in a flashback would just disrupt the flow of things. Then around the 53 minute mark, Alice saves Matt from a zombie that’s attacking him and she recognizes this zombie. We get our longest flashback yet (almost ten seconds!)– Alice and this woman meeting in a deserted graveyard, where Alice is offering her access to the T-virus, Umbrella access codes, surveillance plans… for a price.

So… this one does a bunch of stuff. It’s suddenly casting Alice’s real goals and loyalties into question (at a point when she still can’t even remember them). It’s showing us she was part of a larger story than just the current events going on in the Hive, and making it clear Umbrella has been a questionable company for a while now. It’s also a nice reminder all these zombies were actual people—people we saw back at the start of this doing their jobs, chatting, drinking coffee, and just living their own lives.

And it doesn’t help that shortly after this Matt tells Alice the mystery woman was his sister. The two of them were gathering information to expose Umbrella’s illegal, unethical practices. His sister had found someone who could get them all the information they needed to get out with the evidence… but whoever it was they betrayed her. So now this flashback has Alice really questioning herself—and us questioning her, too. Amnesia-Alice seems great, but maybe if she had all her memories…?

Now, something happens around 70 minutes in that’s worth mentioning. Alice gets some memories back but it’s not set up as a flashback. It’s not in blown-out black and white. It’s not glitchy. And she’s not part of it. She just suddenly recognizes an area of the Hive they’re in and pictures it up and running and full of people. And she remembers what should be in a nearby lab– the cure for the T-virus.

I think this is worth noting because by breaking the flashback format here, the movie’s showing us that things are changing. Alice is getting more solid memories, and they’re appearing more solid because of that. The flashbacks are a clever device and being used well, but things are moving past the point of needing them and trying to force this particular bit of information into that format could actually be distracting at this point. And we never want our flashbacks to be distracting. Also, this scene is a little longer and somewhat talky but it’s happening at a time when our main story has slowed down a bit. Again, it isn’t messing with our flow.

So… moving on. One final flashback, and it happens just two minutes after the last one. They find the lab with the cure and it’s gone. The vault is empty. And as our heroes look around the lab trying to find some clue what might’ve happened to it… Spence has a flashback. And it’s a big one.

Turns out Spence was spying on that meeting in the graveyard, and he decided to steal the T-virus first. And almost 2/3 of his flashback is… the very beginning of the movie. All seen from his point of view. Spence caused the lab accident! Deliberately! To cover his theft.

(fun fact—if you freeze frame at the three minute mark in the very beginning, you can actually see it’s Spence right then! At 3:02, to be exact)

So, what does this last flashback do? It tells us what really happened to cause the lab accident. It reveals Spence as one of our main villains all along. And it firmly establishes that Alice, with or without her memories, is our hero—we find out her “price” for giving Matt’s sister all this evidence is that they use it to destroy the Umbrella Corporation.

Again, new information given in a way that adds to the tension, doesn’t slow down the pace of the actual story, doesn’t undermine anything.

See what I mean? Seven flashbacks in a movie that’s barely a hundred minutes. And heck, really all of them are in the first seventy minutes or so. And every one of them works for both the narrative and linear structure. Every one of them gives us information that’s relevant to “now.”

That’s some good zombie flashbacks.

Next time, I’d like to talk about how long all this takes.

Until then… well, enjoy Halloween.

And then go write.

Revisiting an older post with a Halloween themed post! Sort of! But still with lots of thoughts and (hopefully) informative tips and hints.

I’m going to go out on a limb and guess most of you are familiar with The Twilight Zone. It’s one of those lightning in a bottle things that people have tried to re-create again and again over the years. I think we’re up to… three remake series? And the movie?

During the ‘80s revival, they did a story called “To See The Invisible Man” (adapted by Stephen Barnes from an old Robert Silverberg short story). It’s about a man in a somewhat-utopian society whose asshole behavior gets him sentenced to a year of “public invisibility.” Key thing though…

They don’t actually turn him invisible. He just gets a small sort of implant-mark on his forehead that tells everyone to ignore him. That’s the curse of it. Everyone can see and hear him–and he knows they can– but no one’s allowed to react to him or anything he does. Even when he desperately needs to be acknowledged (I remember an eerie scene in a hospital emergency room after he’s been hit by a car), people just all pretend he’s not there. Even though they know he is.

Why do I bring this up?

In a weird way, this story’s kind of a metaphor for being a writer. The reader absolutely knows I’m there, that I’ve created this story, made up these characters, and chosen these individual words. But at the same time… they don’t want to admit that. They want to get caught up in the flow and immerse themselves in the story and pretend for an hour or an afternoon or a commute home that all of this is real. That it’s just them and the characters and the plot and I’m… not there. Not part of it.

It’s just my opinion, but I think one of the worst things a writer can do is draw attention to themselves in their writing. We need to be invisible. I mean, we want our characters to be seen. We want our dialogue to be heard. We want our action and passion and suspense to leave people breathless. But us—the writers? We’re just distractions. Less of us is more of the story. Being able to restrain myself is usually just as impressive as how excessive i could be.

So here are some ways not to be seen.

Vocabulary— A fair amount of would-be writers are determined to prove they’re cleverer than everyone else. More often than not, they latch onto (or look up) obscure and flowery words because they don’t want to use something “common” in their literary masterpiece. These folks write sprawling, impenetrable prose and all too often they’ll try to defend this habit by saying it’s the reader’s fault for having such a limited vocabulary. After all, I can easily picture a glabrous man in habiliments of titian and atramentous, not my fault you’re so basic.

Any word I’m choosing just to draw attention, to prove I don’t need to use a common word, is the wrong word. Any word that makes my reader stop reading and start analyzing is the wrong word. I can try to justify my word choice any way I like, but when my reader can’t figure out what’s being said for the fourth or fifth time and decides to put the book down and go get caught up on Haunted Hotel… well, there’s only one person to blame. And it’s not them.

Complication— This is kind of like the vocabulary issue. Sometimes folks try to prove how clever or artistic they are by creating overly-elaborate sentences or structuring their whole narrative in a needlessly complicated way. I mean, I once tried to read a book with—no joke—a three-page opening sentence. Yes, sentence.

If I have an actual reason for doing this sort of thing in this piece of writing, fantastic. But if not… why would I do something that makes my readers more and more aware they’re reading a book rather than letting them get immersed in it? My writing should be clean, simple, and natural.

Said— I just talked about this recently so I won’t spend a lot of time on it here, but said is invisible. People skim over said on the page. It’s fantastic that I know a hundred other dialogue tags, but save them for when they matter. If every single tag is the special one, then none of them are special. So I shouldn’t draw attention to myself with twenty different descriptors on the page when I could just use said.

Names. If I use them in moderation, names are invisible. They’re just shorthand for the mental image of a character. But any name that repeats too often becomes the name we see everywhere and then it becomes noise distracting my readers from, y’know, the things I’m actually trying to show them. When Dot talks to Bob and Bob talks to Dot and Dot calls Bob by name and Bob calls Dot by name and then Bob and Dot… I mean, personally I start flinching a bit at that point.

Y’see, Timmy, every time I make the reader hesitate or pause for a second, I’m breaking the flow of the story. I’m encouraging them to skim at best, put the manuscript down at worst. I never want my reader thinking about how much they’re enjoying the latest Peter Clines book—I don’t even want them to think about the fact that they’re reading. I just want them to be immersed in this world alongside Noah, Parker, Olivia, Sam, Josh, the Castaway, Ross, Dieter, Neith, and all the rest.

If I’m the one they’re looking at, something’s gone wrong.

Next time… I thought I’d stick with the Halloweenish theme and do something I’ve threatened you all with for a long time now. I’m going to talk about Resident Evil. A lot.

Oh! And this coming Tuesday night I’m going to be at Mysterious Galaxy in San Diego talking with Eric Heisserer about his fantastic new crime procedural-reincarnation book Simultaneous. You should stop by and check it out.

(and do your homework– go watch Resident Evil)

Until then, go write.

A few weeks back a friend asked me to look at their new manuscript, and something about it gnawed at me. It was doubly gnawsome because it’s something I’ve wanted to talk about here on the ranty blog but could never quite find the right words for. We ended up talking and it suddenly hit me how to explain it. In fact, I asked them if we could pause for a few seconds so I could scribble some notes down for myself.

And now you get to benefit from these thoughts.

I’m guessing most of you have probably heard of Chekhov’s rifle. Basic idea is that if we see a rifle in act one, it should go off in act three. Because if it doesn’t go off… what’s the point of it? Why am I cluttering up my manuscript with rifles that don’t so anything.

Another way to look at this is a setup and a payoff. I make a point of bringing up X now, and later X becomes important for this particular scene, plot thread, or maybe the entire book. For some reason Dad gives Wakko his old pager and fifteen chapters later we realize the last number it received was actually the combination for the hidden vault in the basement. We learn Phoebe used to shoot hoops with her older brothers and then saving the Surf Shack comes down to who can make the most baskets in five minutes. Setup. Payoff.

Now, let’s discuss.

First off, the setup/payoff relationship isn’t quite its own thing. It’s more of a structure element than a literary device. Reveals use setups and payoffs. So do twists. It’s always going to be an aspect of something else, so I don’t want to be thinking of it as some separate, distinct thing.

Second is the big one, and it’s what I wanted to blather on about the most. I’m a big believer that time is a very large aspect of a good setup-payoff relationship. The more time elapses for my reader (or whatever audience I’m dealing with) between the setup and the payoff, the more powerful the payoff will be. My characters will look smarter. My threats will look bigger. My unspeakable horrors will look SO much worse

Or should be, if I’ve got everything else working right.

I’ve talked about this a little bit before. A twist, for example, doesn’t carry a lot of weight on page three. If I want this to just be a cool beat, it doesn’t need the extra time that an OH HOLY CRAP level payoff needs. That time lets my readers absorb the setup, settle into the story, and the more comfortable they are the more impact it’ll have when my payoff hits. So I want to make sure I’ve worked out the right amount of time between the setup and the payoff for the weight I want that reveal to have.

Actually, I just thought of a great metaphor. Imagine you’re leaning out a window with a fairly heavy-duty water balloon. If I just open a first floor window and drop it, there’s a decent chance that balloon’s just going to bounce on the sidewalk and maybe roll away. But from a fourth story window, that water balloon’s definitely going to burst. And if I’m dropping it from a tenth story window… I mean, that thing’s going to explode. It’s the same balloon, but the different distances change how much impact it has. Make sense?

Now, a few things to watch out for…

If I have shorter times between my setups and payoffs, they start to look different. More like I’m just throwing out solutions and then presenting a problem for them. Remember my example up above? It’s one thing if Wakko gets the pager on page nine and he figures out it’s got the vault combination on page seventy, but it’s got a very different feel to it if he gets it on page sixty-six and then figures out the combination four pages later. Especially if I have this sort of structure two or three times throughout my book. This is the kind of thing that makes my writing feel episodic as it happens, well, again and again. Again, dropping from the water balloon from the first story window. Even if it’s a really big water balloon, it might not burst as much as… fall apart? It just won’t be as dramatic.

Also, side issue, if I’m doing this later and later in my story, it can feel a bit fake. I’ve set up the world and my characters, but when I start introducing new elements in the back half just so I can solve problems… that’s probably going to feel a little cheaty. Especially in genre stories. What’s that? I never mentioned the SV-7 androids only have one weak point and it’s at the top of their head? Well, I’m mentioning it now that I’m up here on the catwalk above this one. Again, solution and problem vs setup and payoff.

And I’m not going to lie. Finding this time-reveal ratio can take a little work. It’s one of those things that’s going to be a little different for every situation and every story. And the only one who’s going to know what’s right is.. well, you. The writer. Because you’re the only one who knows how all these reveals and twists and other payoffs are supposed to land.

Y’see, Timmy, at the end of the day it’s really not about the water balloon—it’s about the size of the splash it makes.

Next time, I figured I’d get into the holiday spirit and talk about why it’s good to be the Invisible Man. Or Invisible Woman. Really, any Invisible Person.

Until then, go write.

This week is one of those things I talk about a lot, but I don’t think I’ve really, y’know, talked about it in a while now. Possibly a long while. So I figured, hey, nobody’s made a request, why don’t I update something so I’m not always linking back to ten year old blog posts…

Also, heads up, just to keep things easy, for this post I’m going to be referring to our assembled manuscript as a book or the book or your/my book. I’m going to be talking about story a lot, and I don’t want to cause any confusion between a story (the thing we wrote) and story (the literary device we’ll be talking about). Make sense?

Anyway, let’s talk about plot and story, shall we?

I’m a big believer that the vast majority of good books, movies, television episodes, comic books, short stories—any tale we want to tell, in whatever format we want to tell it in—has two major parts. These are plot and story. Our plot is the events and moments going on outside my characters. Our story is all the events and moments that are going on inside my characters.

(There’s also theme, which is sort of where these two thing interact, but that’s a little bigger and tougher and gives some people scary flashbacks to high school English class, so I’m just going to skip it for now. If you want to read a little bit about theme, I talked about it a while back during the A2Q. But for now—just plot and story)

Also worth noting depending on who your literary professors/ favorite writing coaches are, you may have heard different names for these. Maybe Russian ones or something. If you want to use those that’s fine. We’re talking about art, everyone has their own way of talking about it. If you care, I first heard this put this way many years back when I got to talk with screenwriter/ director Shane Black, and that’s when it really clicked for me, and that’s how I usually explain it.

So when we’re talking about plot and story, plot is everything going on outside of my character. All the external events, challenges, obstacles, and goals in my book. Just to be clear, something that’s ended up inside my body –a brain-control chip, a virus, a bomb where my left lung is supposed to be, a little space worm that crawled into my ear—is still an external threat. External means outside of my characters as people, not as skinbags filled with bone and muscle

An easy way to think of plot is it’s almost always about something my character wants, and they’re trying to do something to get that thing. That may sound kind of huge and vague because, well, it is. My characters could want any number or type of things, and there could be any number/type of things between them. Save Uncle Ricky’s Surf Shop. Ask Wakko out on a date. Stop the invading demons from Otherworld. Throw the best darned Christmas show this town’s ever seen and save our little theater! Or maybe even just getting home.

Also, make note of that bit I just mentioned. Trying to do something. Plot tends to be active. It’s my characters to achieve a goal. If they’re not doing anything (or anything challenging) it’s probably not plot.

Which brings us to story, which is the flipside of plot. Story is all my character’s internal desires and doubts and needs and struggles. It’s what motivates them and what they need to overcome if they don’t want to get left behind (or trampled) by the plot. You may have seen something here or there about how there’s really only seven plots (or six or nine or whatever). There is a small bit of truth to that. But the reason there are millions of different books is because of story. If I drop two different characters into the same situation, I’m going to get different results, because they’re going to approach things… well, differently. If Steve Rogers gets the super soldier formula, things go one way. If Peggy Carter gets it, they go a different way. To quote Javier Grillo-Marxuach (who’s made, like, half the sci-fi/ fantasy shows you’ve loved in the past decade) —“Plot gets you into a scene, character gets you out.”

And this is because characters aren’t all going to do the same thing in a given situation. Who they are affects how they react to different obstacles and how they choose to overcome them (or maybe just avoid them). Uncle Ricky may have just given up, but Yakko would try to save the Surf Shop by taking out a second mortgage (despite the horrible interest rates), Wakko might hold a bikini car wash, and Dot may finally try to find the lost treasure of that old pirate captain, Jacques Le Maudit.

Another important note. While plot tends to be active, story tends to be reactive. All that internal stuff doesn’t change unless some outside influence makes it change. Essentially, some plot runs face-first into my characters and story dictates how they react to that plot. Maybe they react exactly the way we’d expect… but maybe they also step out of their comfort zone (willingly or not) and do something else. And then the plot keeps running into them again and again and—for better or for worse—they’re forced to take more steps. So the plot’s constantly nudging my characters to grow and change. We enjoy the plot, but what we get invested in is the story. We want to see these characters move out of their comfort zones and adapt to deal with whatever the plot’s hitting them with.

There’s probably some technical term for that but I can’t remember it.

Now, there are definitely books (and movies and tv shows and more) that are light on story and heavier on plot. And vice-versa. And some of them are very successful. But I really believe we can feel it when that balance gets thrown off in a book, when one of these two elements gets more weight than the other. We’ve all seen a movie that’s just pure plot where the characters dodge killer androids and punch Nazis and barely grow or change at all. They’re all essentially the same at the end as they were at the beginning. And I’m sure we’ve all seen or read something where… well, nothing happens. Characters just sit around pontificating on the nature of power, the unfairness of life, the chemical origins of love or, y’know, some other kind of navel-gazily topic. Because there’s no plot nudging them to do anything else.

Y’see, Timmy, I know that’s a bit polarizing for some folks, but I really do believe every good book should have a plot and a story. They can overlap. They can intertwine. But if I’m missing one or the other, no matter how many rationalizations I want to make… my work’s probably going to be lacking.

And my audience is going to be able to tell.

Next time… well, we talked about redemption a few weeks back. maybe it’s worth talking about it’s angry sibling. Revenge.

Until then… go write.