Category: structure

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.”

Do you want to be a writer? YES / NO

Continue to the next paragraph.

One thing I’ve mentioned here once or thrice before is flow. It’s one of those elements of writing that we’re all instinctively aware of but it rarely gets a consistent name put to it. I first heard it referred to as flow years back by a writing coach named Drusilla Campbell. It was such a perfect term I’ve used it myself ever since.

Flow is how well the reader can move through your writing. It’s the way every line of dialogue rolls off the tongue, how each paragraph and chapter draws the reader into the next one. Like the flow of a river or the flow of traffic on a freeway. When the flow of writing is going well, you love it.

We can also define what makes for bad flow. When the river or the freeway aren’t going so well you get rapids, bottlenecks, gridlock, and so on. More to the point, you get frustrated and angry. A story that makes you stumble a lot doesn’t flow well at all. Clumsy, wooden dialogue and poor characterization don’t work either. Whenever a reader pauses to scratch their head or roll their eyes over the latest “twist,” that’s another speedbump in the proverbial road. If you’ve ever tried a book and just couldn’t get into it, odds are the flow sucked. You’ll read, trip over a page or two, and put it back down.

Y’see, Timmy, it’s not a bad thing to shock the reader once or twice with a bit of unexpected action, a clever reveal, or something else that jars them out of complacency.. It’s important, though, to remember that those shocks are the exception, not the rule. If a story is nothing but flashbacks or “gotcha” moments one after another, it degenerates into nonsense and frustration.

Readers keep reading material with good flow because it’s easier to keep reading than to put it down. Stephen King writes books with great flow. So do Lee Child and Clive Cussler. They’re all famous for it, in fact. Shane Black’s screenplays are notoriously fun to read. It’s also a big part of the reason all these people keep selling their work for high sums of money.

Now, for the record, flow is another one of those things I believe you can’t easily work on and develop in your writing. It’s one of those X-factors, where you can manipulate each of the variables but still not affect the final outcome. You just have to keep writing and keep writing and eventually one day it will all come together.

For example, in Goju-ryu, one of the original three forms of karate developed on Okinawa, there’s a kata called senchin (no, trust me, this is another one of those brilliant metaphors). The moves for senchin are often taught to the white belt novices. The instructors know that by the time the novices become black belts, they’ll have an understanding of how all the moves go together and can start to work on the form itself. The Okinawan masters understand that working on parts doesn’t always help you master the whole. One day, it just all comes together.

I’ve mentioned most of these before (often in greater detail), but here are a few easy tips that can help the flow of a story. I’m not saying doing these guarantees great flow, but if you’re going out of your way not to do them… well…

Keep it interesting– Easiest way in the world to keep readers from getting bored is not to be boring. A story that drags on and on before getting to the point doesn’t have good flow. If you’re telling a story, get to the story. If it’s a murder mystery, give me a body. If it’s sci fi, show me something amazing. If it’s a love story, show me passion on some level.

Keep it honest– Nothing will kill a story’s flow faster than something that reads as inherently false. People don’t give long speeches about love, honor, or duty in real life. Most of us stopped with the silly, mushy, giggly, fluttering eyelids in ninth grade. And it takes a lot for someone to stay angry for days, let alone years. Fake emotions and actions comes from fake people. Fake people are boring. See above for tips on boring your reader.

Keep it simple— If a writer tries to cram fifteen supporting characters, eight subplots, and the setup for four sequels into a 110 page screenplay, there’s not going to be a lot of room for a coherent story. If said writer decides to alternate each chapter, scene, or spoken line of dialogue between one of ten different time frames it’s going to keep knocking the reader out of the story as they try to keep track of what’s happening where and when to who. Don’t forget the basic goal of writing is to make the reader go on to the next page, not to baffle and confuse them.

Keep it smooth — If you’re picking obscure, awkward, or overly-long words just to show off your vocabulary, there’s a good chance you’re disrupting the flow of your own writing. It’s very impressive that you can picture what a titian-haired female with atramentous works of muted ink inlaid in her flesh looks like, but it’s much smoother, easier, and just as visual to tell us she’s a tattoed redhead.

Keep it relevant–One thing that pretty much always causes a stumble is when the writer adds in something completely irrelevant. Not when this character makes an odd movie reference or a cat walks by for no reason. No, the stumbling point is when the writer spends a paragraph or a page or more on something that has no bearing on the story whatsoever. When there’s an exacting description of the bus driver, a monologue about the morality of Israel vs. Palestine, or a flashback to fourth grade art class, odds are the flow has just been dammed up for no reason.

Watch your dialogue– You can get away with one character who talks like a robot and uses all those obscure, overly-long words I was just talking about. Possibly another who keeps slipping into a foreign language. Too much unnatural, stylized, or just plain bad dialogue brings the story (and the reader) to a screeching halt, though. Mechanics talk like mechanics. Investment bankers talk like investment bankers. Heavily armored mutants from Skaros talk like heavily… well, you get the point.

Have characters act in character.— On the same panel where she talked about flow, Drusilla Campbell commented that when the nun viciously kills a gardener is also when most people remember they have laundry they should be folding. Master snipers who can’t hit what they’re aiming at. Genius investigators who miss obvious clues. High school students who talk and act like 35-year-old investment bankers. If you’re not very, very careful, these are the characters who get books and screenplays tossed in the big left-hand pile.

Take it seriously– So, everyone makes a joke now and then to break the tension. But you should never be winking at the audience. Even if you’re doing camp or comedy, you need to be approaching your material as a sincere and honest effort on your own part. If you’re not, the reader will know and they won’t take you seriously. Not being taken seriously gets your manuscript put down in the left hand pile. After all, if the reader thinks the events in your writing don’t mean all that much to you, why should they care about them?

Eight tips for all of us to follow. Especially you. Yeah, you.

Next week’s little rant comes with an important message, so please be here.

Until then, go write.

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.

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.