Category: Suffering Map

Variety, as a wise man once said, is the spice of life.

There’s a lot of truth to that. After all, it never hurts a person, especially a creative person, to go out and try a lot of new things. Visit new places. Taste new foods. Learn new skills. Or go out to sow a bunch of wild oats, as my eighty-eight year old great-aunt Marie said I should do right before graduation.

That was an awkward lunch, let me tell you.

Heck, even within our writing, variety is a pretty good. Repetition of words makes people’s eyes glaze over, and makes it look like you’ve got an extremely limited vocabulary. Heck, that’s why we have pronouns, so we don’t need to repeat the same nouns all the time. As Rufus Xavier Sarsaparilla once said, using all those nouns over and over can really wear you down.

When I was starting out as a wee little writer, back in the days when Brian Daley’s Han Solo Trilogy was considered the apex of modern literature by most intelligent folks, I understood the need for variety. There were lots of things I didn’t know about writing, but my early exploration into words showed me that something could be blue or sapphire or sky-colored. Hair could be golden or flaxen or blond (and sometimes blonde).

One thing I came to realize was the number of descriptive ways dialogue could be attributed to speakers. My characters could declare. They could retort. They could intone. At times I had them growl, mutter, curse, hiss, whisper, shout, shriek, cackle, answer, and respond. On rare occasions, they were known to moan and gasp and groan. Once, I clearly remember one of them pontificating.

Before I was twenty I had set down a personal rule of variety, so to call it. Words should never duplicate on the same page. Especially not for mundane things like dialogue descriptors. There were so many more colorful and exotic and specific ways to get across what a character was saying.

However…

About ten years back I had the lucky chance to sit down with an editor from Tor books at the San Diego State Writer’s Conference. I’m ashamed to say I can’t remember his name, even though I’ve gone digging through old notes and emails trying to find it. This polite gent looked at the first few pages of The Suffering Map. He thought the bit with the payphone was wonderfully creepy and even liked the ravens at the library that finished off the first chapter. One thing had him shaking his head, though, and I think my face probably went a little slack as he demolished one of my long-standing personal rules.

(I’m paraphrasing a bit here, since this was face to face and about a decade back).

“Said is invisible,” he explained. “People skim over said without even realizing they’ve read a word, so your story moves faster. You don’t need all these words.” He showed me the first two pages, with a good two dozen red circles across them.

My clever attempt to show off my vocabulary and add color to my writing had left an editor shaking his head.

What shocked me even more, though, was discovering how right he was. I went home, sat down at the keyboard, and about 90% of those words became said. And the story did more faster. Heck, I even lost two pages off the total length. Just like that.

I still come across folks who believe as I once did. And it’s easy to see why they do. Whispering something is very different than saying it. Snarling an answer implies a different tone and subtext than saying it.

But how much of this is the reader going to do for you? Once I know the character and the context, doesn’t that set most of the tone and subtext for me? We all know the Joker has that hysterical edge to his voice. Does he really need to giggle or chuckle or cackle his lines?

Want proof?

Look back up at the opening of this little rant, and some of the folks I talked about. The wise man. Rufus. My wonderful great-aunt Marie. Nobody intoned or declared or advised. They all just said. That’s it. And you cruised over it quickly, smoothly, and without effort.

I’m not saying never use these other words, but they should be the exception in your writing, not the rule. I’ve suggested limiting yourself to four adjectives per page and one adverb. Try going back over something of yours and using just one or two clever dialogue descriptors per page. When they’re rare, they’ll have weight. They’ll have punch. And that punch is what makes your writing stand out.

Next week, just to keep you all on your toes, I want to talk about how no one should ever see your writing. Absolutely no one.

Until then, back to writing.

Most everyone loves a good mystery. Some people like having the puzzle to solve as the clues are doled out one by one, or perhaps as it becomes apparent they were sitting out in the open all along. Other folks love getting the big twist they should’ve seen coming, but the writer managed to slip it past them. Solving mysteries makes people feel clever, a good part of the reason this storytelling form has survived for well over a century.

A great example of the mystery story and structure is Scooby-Doo. No, seriously. In the classic series, it wasn’t unusual for Scooby, Shaggy and their pals (anyone mentioning a much later “puppy power” add-on to the cast will be banned from this blog) to go off somewhere and encounter a ghost, a haunted deep-sea diving suit, or even a reanimated mummy seeking its magical coin. However, as the story progressed, clues would be found, motives revealed, and what seemed eerie and impossible at first began to look more mundane and plausible. In the end, it wasn’t too much of a surprise to finally find out the reanimated mummy was really Doctor Najib in a costume, trying to steal the coin so he could sell it to a collector.

That’s the point of a good mystery. When all the pieces fall into place and everything makes sense. Readers (and agents and editors) love that beautiful moment when all the clues line up and they can look back over the story and say “Ahhhhhhh… I see.”

Now, here’s the one real catch, in case you missed it. Just having someone speak cryptically doesn’t cut it. Neither does deliberately withholding a ton of information from the audience. Nor do piles of weird occurrences or clues which don’t seem to mean anything but your characters treat like the discovery of the Dead Sea scrolls. If you want your story to have that cool, odd air of mystery that makes people wonder and question and remember your story…

Well, you need to actually have a mystery.

A fairly common flaw I see is writers trying to convince readers there’s a mystery going on in their story. They don’t actually have one, mind you, but they know Arthur Conan Doyle and Agatha Christie became famous with them, plus shows like LOST and movies like The Prestige got people talking. So these writers will have an aloof man in a trench coat who drops one-line, indecipherable comments. An unusual reference that keeps cropping up again and again throughout the story. Sometimes (wooden as it sounds) just a character who keeps repeating lines like “What does that mean?” or “Who are you?” or “I don’t understand!”

Again, there’s no actual puzzle, just the implication there’s one the reader can’t see. The best sign of this is that nothing is ever solved or revealed—the story is just an ongoing series of empty, random events attempting to evoke a sense of mystery.

There needs to be something behind the words on the page, even if it’s something your readers don’t immediately get to see. When Velma, Shaggy, and Scooby find that smear of white paint on the wall, they and the audience all need to believe this is something important and not just a randomly inserted MacGuffin the writer stuck in to fill a few script pages. As the writer, you need to know what that smear of white paint means long before those meddling kids even see it.

In my oft-referred-to work The Suffering Map, the character of Bareback often talks in a deliberately vague, roundabout way. He also subtly displays a knowledge of future events. When the full workings and history of the Polynecronious Transporter are explained, Bareback’s prescience suddenly has an eerie logic behind it, and his earlier, obtuse way of speaking now makes sense. It’s a mystery, but it’s a real mystery.

What you want, as a writer, is to be a magician rather than a con artist. The magician shows you empty boxes and hats, a cage full of rabbits and a deck of cards. Then he or she does something amazing with it and you know they’ve done something amazing. Maybe you even have a vague sense of how it was done, even if not a complete understanding. You’re left feeling thrilled and excited.

The con artist, though… when he or she shows you those empty boxes it’s for a very different reason. It’s because they don’t really have a trick, and they’re hoping they’ll never have to show you something in the box. They’ll just take your money and you’ll be left standing there waiting for something to happen. They’re the ones who know the truth of what’s going on will just annoy their audience.

It sounds silly, but if you want your story to have a mystery, then it needs to have a mystery. It has to be smart. It has to be hidden for a reason within the story. It actually has to mean something.

If it isn’t… you’re just another con artist.

And we all knew what happened to the con artist at the end of Scooby-Doo.

There comes a point in every challenge when you realize you’re not getting ahead. That all the time, effort, and enthusiasm you mustered for a project just isn’t enough. Why isn’t important, the fact is… it just isn’t.

At which point, you need to make a choice. Do you keep storming the castle? Continue throwing yourself into the breach? Forge on despite all odds with the strength of your convictions?

Or do you give up?

Honestly? If it was up to me…

I think you should quit.

No, keep reading. There’s an important part to this.

If you’ve spent the past decade trying to get any publisher in the world to just look at one of your book manuscripts, and they’re not interested—take a hint. If you’ve spent hundreds and hundreds of dollars on screenwriting classes and contests over the past ten or twelve years, but still don’t even have one toenail in the door—save your money.

You should stop. Cut your losses. Quit. Stop beating your head against the wall, demanding to be recognized, and move on.

In a way, this ties back to something I wrote about a while back. You need to be able to look at your own work honestly and objectively. Knowing when to give up on a project is part of that. After querying 500 or so reps and not getting a single nibble, you need to consider the fact the problem may not lay with them. Your writing may be perfect, it may be gold, it may be what everyone in America is dying for. At the moment, though, for one reason or another, it’s not what those specific people are looking for. And, right or wrong, they are the ones who decide if everyone else gets to see it. As a wise man once said, they are the gatekeepers. They are guarding all the doors and holding all the keys.

Now… here’s that important part.

I’m not saying stop writing altogether. It’s just time to sit back and look at what you’ve done and how you’re doing things. Maybe the problem is characters. Maybe it’s dialogue. Could just be your cover letter. Perhaps even something as basic as an overwhelming number of typos. At the end of the day, you’re doing something that needs to stop happening, because one way or another it’s holding you back.

I’ve met people who wrote one novel way back in college and have spent the past twenty or thirty years sending it to agent after agent, publisher after publisher. They haven’t changed one word since they first set it down on paper. They haven’t done anything else since. They’ve just got that one story going out again and again and again…

Same thing in Hollywood. People write a screenplay over a long weekend, never polish or revise it, but try to use it as a calling card for years. I know of one guy on the contest circuits who’s been pushing the same script for almost a decade. He hasn’t done anything else in the meantime.

Knowing when to quit and move on isn’t a weakness or a flaw. It’s a strength. It’s the only way you can grow and learn new things, because you won’t get any better if you keep poking at the same manuscript again and again for decades. Sometimes you just have to give up on something. If you want to be all new-age about it… you need to learn to let go.

It took me almost eleven years to finish my first solid novel, The Suffering Map. Not an idea, not a work in progress, not something I’ve been poking at. A complete, polished book manuscript, cover-to-cover. Beginning, middle, and end. Yeah, that’s a long time, but close to a decade of that was the film industry convincing me to go work on screenplays instead. If I wanted to make myself feel better, I could probably say it only took about two years of actual work.

Of course, these ongoing rants aren’t about making any of us feel better. Even me…

So, eleven years of work, and then the querying began. Letter after letter, rejection after rejection. Go through it again, create a new draft, and then start the letters again. Some people asked to see it. Some very nice, high-end, holy-crap-I- can’t-believe-he/she-asked-for-this people. Many letters and emails were traded back and forth.

In the end, though, after almost a dozen very major revisions, all of them passed on it. And then I realized, this was done. At that point I’d spent over a dozen years on said novel. Almost my entire life since graduating from college.

Time to work on something else.

I’m not saying I’ll never go back to it. Many writers will tell you if your screenplay or novel gets rejected, put it in the drawer and wait a few years. I’m also not saying it will sell in a heartbeat if I decide to try again in five years. For now, though, I’ve given up on it. I’ve admitted defeat and moved onto (and finished) another novel. And several short stories (many of which have sold). Even a screenplay which did passably well on the contest circuits. Not to mention a paying-the-rent career as an entertainment journalist.

If I’d stayed focused on that novel no one wanted to see, though, I wouldn’t’ve done any of it. I’d still be back there at square one. And my list of published credits wouldn’t be the size it is now.

So the next time the thought of quitting crosses your mind because you’re frustrated with your screenplay or novel or the ongoing search for an agent… actually stop and think about it. Perhaps it’s time, as the networks like to say, to put that bit of work on indefinite hold. Maybe even a few bits of work.

Then look in a new direction, start writing again, and do something different.

In Hollywood there’s a term called “high-concept.” At its purest, high concept is a film idea that can be boiled down to one sentence or less, and that one sentence will instantly let you know what the film’s about and make you want to see it. Some famous high-concept pitches you’ll probably recognize quickly would include “Aliens blow up the White House” or “Big lizard, Big Apple” (although I hope you didn’t sit though that last one). Steve Alten got quite far with “Jurassic shark” (I never thought the book was that great, but I love that line).

One part of a high concept story is that it’s easy to tell what genre it belongs in. There’s a reason this appeals to executive types. Knowing the genre makes a story—be it a novel or a film—easier to market. If your title cleverly (or not so cleverly) reflects this, all the better. To paraphrase Kevin Smith, no one’s going to walk into Zack and Miri Make A Porno thinking it’s a meditation on the Holocaust. By the same token, if you try to define Batman Begins as a romantic comedy (or market it as one), you’re going to find it misses the mark and fails on pretty much every level.

Story the first…

An acquaintance of mine recently asked me for some feedback on a screenplay she’d written. Her formatting was fine, the dialogue was pretty solid, and she’d come up with a pretty decent core idea. The problem was, I couldn’t figure out what genre the script was. Twenty pages in I couldn’t tell if I was reading a comedy that needed another draft or an action flick that needed three or four. I still couldn’t tell at the fifty page mark. Even when I finished, I was lost as to what kind of story it was. And part of the problem with that was it made the script very hard to interpret. Was this scene going for comedy or high drama? Action or absurdity? Since I couldn’t tell what goals the script was trying to achieve, I couldn’t tell if it reached them or not.

If you were looking for your book at Borders or Barnes & Noble, where would it be? What about the DVD release of your screenplay? Here’s another tidbit of advice from very quotable agent Esmond Harmsworth. “It’s not like anything else is very hard to sell.” While everybody wants to be the publisher/ producer behind a groundbreaking new bestseller/ blockbuster, no one actually wants to be the person who takes the risk of something new and untested. It’s always going to be much safer to go with something proven such as an apocalyptic horror novel in the vein of The Stand, a television show that’s like an updated X-Files, or a film that’s like Die Hard but in a building.

(no joke—that last one was an actual Hollywood pitch. Bonus tip—actually know the stories you’re comparing your work to and not just what people say about them on message boards)

Story the second…

In other posts I’ve mentioned my first attempt at a novel, The Suffering Map. With queries and conferences, I’ve had the chance to pitch it to several agents. And one problem I had from the start was… what genre is it? It had lots of horror ideas and beats, without question, but it wasn’t a straight horror novel. By the same token, there were many fantasy elements, but it really wasn’t a fantasy. A fair amount of gore, but not to splatterpunk extremes. It was set in the real world, but I dreaded calling it urban fantasy. You could even argue a sci-fi label because there was a large time travel element, except there was absolutely nothing scientific about it…

So how the heck would I pitch it without making it seem like some horrible everything-but-the-kitchen-sink amalgamation or… well, not like anything else?

In the end… I made up a sub-genre.

Yep, that’s right. I beat the Kobayashi Maru by changing the rules. After much wrangling and about 200 drafts of a query letter, I made up a classification that fit my story and explained its place in the book store.

End result? Requests from three major agencies.

This doesn’t mean a writer who crosses several genres is doomed to difficult sales, mind you. It just means you need to know what you’re crossing. An action-horror screenplay would interest many producers, but they’ll be annoyed if they open it and don’t find any horror elements. Or worse, an abundance of romantic comedy situations. There’s nothing wrong with it, but it’s not what they picked up the script to find. Likewise, if you send your sci-fi western short story to a mystery digest magazine, it’s not really their fault when you get rejected.

If you’re writing a genre, study it. Read four or five different books by different authors. Watch five or six different films by different writers and directors. How does your material stack up with theirs? Do you have the same beats? The same themes? Similar types of characters? Do they get the reactions you want your writing to get? When your work gets listed as one of the top five –insert genre here—books or films, can you name the other four works on that list alongside yours?

If not… get back to your desk.

And no matter what, get back to writing. You’ve wasted enough time on the internet for now.