Category: tone

November 17, 2016 / 1 Comment

That Cool Moment When…

            Hey, folks. So very sorry I missed last week.  I had this thing all plotted out and then I somehow ended up in the Mirror Universe. And not the cool part of the Mirror Universe… the bad part.
            Hey, speaking of cool stuff…
            I read a book recently where the characters spent most of their time trying to verbally one-up each other. Every line of dialogue was a cool, badass line.
            Which still wasn’t quite as exhausting as a couple books I’ve read that were just non-stop super-cool action and conflict from page one.
            Although, that was better than the folks who tried to do an uber-cool plot structure of a cool flashback within a cool story within a really cool flashback.
            Saying “cool” that many times is kinda… uncool, isn’t it?
            Now, with that in mind…  I’d like to repeat a little experiment I did for some of you a few years back.  Please pay close attention to the following paragraph.  Don’t write anything down, but try to keep a lot of it in mind.  There’ll be questions afterwards.

            LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA!!
            So…
            What parts of that stood out to you?  What was the high point?  Did the paragraph hold you from beginning to end?
            Odds are none of it stood out for you.  And the high point was probably when it ended, right?  In fact, I’m willing to bet you got halfway through the first line and just probably skimmed down to the end. 
            Nah, don’t worry, I won’t hold it against you.  Any sane person would’ve done the same thing.  It was just a bunch of LAs.
            Here’s another example. A variation on the theme, you might say.  Have you ever heard a tuning fork?  Tuning forks are perfect, y’know.  If you have a middle-C tuning fork it will hit that note and hold it for ages. 
            That said… have you ever felt compelled to listen to a tuning fork for hours?  No? Why wouldn’t you want to listen to constant perfection?
            Because it’s boring!
            A tuning fork plays one note.  That’s it.  It’s the musical equivalent of LA LA LA LA.  Middle C is great, and any musician from Bach to Pharrell will tell you it’s all but impossible to work without it–but it can’t be the only note.  It’s part of a system of highs and lows that we call music.
            Storytelling works the same way.  A story that’s just all the same thing is the literary equivalent of a tuning fork.  It’s neat for a minute or two… and then it starts to wear on your nerves. 
            I’ve mentioned this idea before, because it applies to several aspects of writing.  Structure.  Dialogue.  Action.  I can’t have a story that’s all action.  I can’t have a script that’s nothing but Oscar moments.  Every line can’t be a cool line.  Because if it’s all at the same level—if it’s all cool—then it’s all monotone.
            Look at Doctor Strange.  Big popular Marvel movie right now, yes?  And, yeah—no spoilers—it has scenes of magical combat and all that skyline-bending we saw in the commercials.  Lots of other cool stuff, too.  But it also has quite a few scenes where Strange just reads medical reports and books.  He listens to music.  At one point he has a conversation with a guy on a basketball court.  He even writes a few emails.
            Y’see, Timmy, it’s the up-and-down, back-and-forth nature that makes for interesting stories.  If you look at any good story, you’ll see that most of its elements swing back and forth between extremes.  Lows and highs.  Calm and frenetic.  Average and unforgettable.
            Because, again, if my story elements don’t have this up and down nature, if it’s all the same, then it’s just a line.  It doesn’t matter how high the line is, even if every point on it scores a perfect ten, even if it all goes to eleven…it’s still just a flat line.
            And you know what “flatline” is another term for, right?
            Dead.
            Next time… well, next Thursday is Thanksgiving here in the states.  But I owe you all one from last week, so I’ll try to get something up the night before.  That way I won’t feel like a total fraud.

            Until then, go write.

actiondialoguemarvelstructuretone
December 7, 2012 / 2 Comments

That’s Crossing The Line!

            I’ve been asked about a dozen times lately to take part in “The Next Big Thing.”  If you’re not familiar with it, it’s sort of a self-promotional blog tour that a lot of authors are passing around.  I passed on it because that’s not the kind of thing I use this page for.  Oh, sure, I’ll mention it if I have a new release or maybe if something of mine goes on sale, but I don’t want to go much further than that.  This page is more about hints and instruction than anything else.

            And I suck at self-promotion.
            But that’s all a bit besides the point.  I didn’t want to blather on about crossing that line this week.  I wanted to talk about crossing lines.
            Some people think a genre story has to be pure.  A horror story should be nothing but suspense and scares and gore.  Every moment of a drama should be serious and weighty.  Comedies should be non-stop laughs—there shouldn’t be a moment where something inherently funny isn’t happening on the page or the screen..
            The thing is, those “pure” stories are all boring as hell.  The horror ones stop being scary.  The drama becomes melodrama.  The comedy becomes painful. 
            The reason for this is a lack of variety.  An idea I’ve mentioned before is that the tension levels in a story should rise as the story progresses.  It’s great to begin my story with the action dialed up to nine, but it doesn’t really leave me anywhere to go.  If my novel or screenplay has everything dialed up to nine, what I’ve really got is a monotone story.
            Likewise, if every point on my story graph is the same point—say unspeakable horror or maybe uber-cool action—then what I now have is a homogenous script.  Flipping pages is like cutting into a block of cheese.  Every part is just like every other part.  Case in point…
            unspeakable horror
            Unspeakable Horror
            Unspeakable Horror
            UNSPEAKABLE HORROR
            UNSPEAKABLE HORROR !!
            Even when I’m escalating things, getting the same point over and over and over again becomes silly pretty quick. 
            Consider most of the good stories you’ve read or seen.  There’s a lot of comedy in Jaws.  Ernie Cline’s cyber-fantasy tale Ready Player One has some moments of serious suspense.  Raiders of the Lost Ark has a wonderful love story in it.  Dan Abnett’s sci-fi action novel Embeddedhas a pretty enthusiastic sex scene.  Ghostbustersactually gets a bit scary at points.  The characters in the new Hobbit movie break out into song.  Twice.
            That being said, I don’t think any of us would call Jaws a comedy, and Embedded is hardly a porno.  Raiders has that love story and a couple really good laughs, but I don’t think anyone in their right mind would call it a romantic comedy.  And The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journeyis definitely not a musical.  We all realize that little dips and swings into what would qualify as another genre doesn’t invalidate a story.
            If anything, they usually strengthen it.
            The secret to all storytelling is characters, and the best characters are going to act like real people.  They’ll tell jokes at the wrong time.  Some of them will think about love and sex when they should be paying attention in board meetings, and others will fret about those board meetings at moments they should be thinking about love and sex.  A few of them might even be stressed about scratching the paint on Dad’s car when they should really be worried about the axe murderer lumbering up behind them.  
            One of the most dramatic moments in The Empire Strikes Back is when they’re about to test the carbon-freezing on Han Solo.  For all intents, he’s walking to his execution.  He knows it, his friends know it, we know it.  Even if he survives– he’s gone.  Leia knows this and finally admits her true feelings… and Han responds with a wiseass comment.  We all giggle and then there’s a horrible blast of steam as Han’s turned into a piece of collectible wall art.
            Y’see, Timmy, if my stories and characters lack this kind of range they’re going to come across as very flat and tedious.  If I can’t have a moment of laughter, a bit of flirting, or a non-sequitor distracted thought, my characters are going to feel like puppets rather than people.  Much like a chef uses a few different flavors to bring out the main tastes of a meal, a writer wants to sprinkle in a few moments that step out of the genre to make the characters and the material much more powerful.
            So don’t be scared to stretch a toe over those lines now and then.
            I know I said I was going to talk about structure, but that’s kind of a huge set of post so I think I might save it until the new year and take a bit of stress out of my holidays.  So next time, I’m  probably just going to say something quick about heroes.
            Until then, go write.
abnettcomedydramagenreHorrorRaidersStar WarsTolkientone
June 8, 2012 / 2 Comments

Crystal Clear Tone

            The title will become clear further into the rant.  Hopefully.

            Shamefully, some pandering, too.  My new novel, 14, just came out.  It’s there on the sidebar.  Ebook only, at the moment, but this time next week that link should take you to the paperback version.
            As some of you know, I used to write for a fairly popular screenwriting magazine.  It let me talk to lots of professionals about their job, and it also let me see a lot of movies for free.  A lot of movies, sometimes weeks or even months before they came out.  To be honest, the last movie my lovely lady and I paid to see was V for Vendetta.  Before that was probably Batman Begins, which we saw twice—once with our friend Max and once just the two of us.
            But that really doesn’t have anything to do with this week’s topic.
            Or does it?
            Anyway, one day I was in the office and the editor, Amy, asked me about a film she knew I’d seen a few weeks earlier.  One of the other journalists had suggested the idea of doing a big piece on horror-comedies for the September-October issue, and the movie I’d seen (let’s call it Gorefest) was one of the ones that had come up as a potential subject.  Amy wanted to know if I thought Gorefest would fit the article.
            I didn’t think so.  The filmmakers were telling a horror story, and they knew that too many jokes and cheap laughs would shift the tone of the film and knock it into a different category.  Gorefest was a horror movie, and it had several moments of comedy in it, like a lot of modern horror films.  But it wasn’t a horror comedy.  They never crossed that line.
            The other journalist insisted it was, though, and used it anyway.  In the final article, the screenwriter of Gorefestopenly said it wasn’t a horror comedy.  And Amy gave me a little grin the next time I was in the office.
            This is an example of someone being a bit tone deaf.  You’ve probably heard this term applied to both music and writing.  In music, it’s when I don’t realize that a group of notes or chords clashes with another group.  And that’s pretty much what it means in writing, too.  When something doesn’t work in my story, tonally, it means something’s clashing or overpowering something it shouldn’t, to the point that it stands out.  In this particular case, the journalist was projecting emphasis onto those comedy bits that wasn’t there in the script—he was deaf to the actual tone of the film.
            I interviewed Kevin Smith a few years back for one of his movies (Zach and Miri Make a Porno).  One question I asked was about working with Seth Rogen.  After all, Smith notoriously hates ad-libs and Rogen is famous for constantly riffing on lines, coming up with new ideas and variations for almost every take.
            He was quick to correct me, though.  His reputation for hating ad-libs came from his first few films, when he realized he and his cast were too inexperienced to be making big deviations from the script.  So back then, he was very strict about sticking to the page.  And while he’s loosened up a bit, he still favors the script over random interpretations on set.  “So often you’ll get an actor who just starts saying stuff that’s very funny to the crew or me or the other actors, but it’s not germane to the discussion,” he told me.  “It’ll be great on a friggin’ blooper reel, but I can’t fit this into the scene.”
            And, yes, I did clean up Kevin Smith’s quote a bit for those of you reading this at work.  Feel free to swap in the words you think he used.  You’ll be right.
            Just because something’s good in and of itself doesn’t mean something is good in the bigger scheme of things.  I can throw a great slapstick comedy scene into my Somalian pirates script, and it may be some of the greatest slapstick ever written.   But it’s going to stick out like a sore thumb amidst the gunfire, brutal killings, and mounting tension.  I could write some stuff right now that could make most of you reading this cringe or get grossed out.  It’s not really that hard. 
            The thing is, what would be the point of doing it right now?  You’re reading this to learn about writing, not to get nauseous.  It might be some fantastically disgusting imagery, but it just wouldn’t fit here any more than… well, a random discussion about the last couple of movies I paid to see.
            I see this kind of stuff all the time.  Random gore for the sake of gore.  Long monologues in an action film.  Comical sidekicks wedged in for no reason except to be the comical sidekick.  Romance that’s shoehorned in just so there’s a reason for a female character.
            Another quick story, one I’ve mentioned here before.  A friend gave me a horror script to look at a few years back.  It was a basic “cabin in the woods” setup with a clever idea behind it.  My friend knew that sex sells, and he told me before I read it that he’d added a nude scene.  It actually turned out to be a hardcore lesbian sex scene.  Three pages of boobs, some bondage, toys, and insertions.  It was so graphic, in fact, there was nothing to call it except pornographic.  And that’s a major shift in tone right in the middle of a fairly creepy horror story.
            This is one of the harder criticisms to give.  For a lot of people—especially inexperienced people—it’s also one of the harder ones to receive.  It’s very hard for some folks to grasp that something can be good and still not be right. 
            If I had to guess, I’d probably say part of the reason people have trouble with this concept comes from that reverse-engineering idea I mentioned a few weeks back.  Element X works well in story Y, therefore it stands to reason element X will work in story Z.  There’s also probably a bit of special snowflake mentality—the idea that doing something good should somehow automatically translate to success.  And, for some writers, there’s probably an empathy issue in there as well.
            Y’see, Timmy, tone is about my story as a whole.  Not this particular funny joke or that one creepy description or that strongly-implied (or blatantly shown) sex scene.  Tone is how my entire story feels overall and how it’s going to be viewed.  That’s not to say I can’t have comedy or romance or action in my story.  It’s these little moments of flavor and color that make a story really sing.  The trick is to know how much comedy and how much romance will work in a given story—and maybe accepting that the answer is “none.”  Because things that break the tone generally break the flow, too.
            And if you can’t tell you’re breaking the flow… well, don’t worry.  Your readers will let you know one way or the other.
            Next time, I’d like to talk to you about a wonderful lesson we can all learn from an old Benny Hill skit.
            Until then, go write.
criticismflowgenresmithsnowflakestructuretonetransplants
November 10, 2011 / 3 Comments

Tone Deaf

           So, I wanted to talk to you a bit about G.I. Joe.

           Not the cool cartoon, mind you.  Or the toy line.  No, I’m talking about the completely God-awful, live-action movie.  It had problems.  Lots of problems.  Not the least of which was a  complete failure to remember sixth-grade science class.
            The big issue I’d like to address, though, is the weight.
            Doc Brown and his assistant Marty taught us that some things are heavy.  They have weight.  They have, if I may use a literary term (sorry), gravitas—a certain dignity and importance and bearing.
            Stephen King, on the other hand, taught us that some things are soft and squishy and bleed a lot when you shove knives or claws or fangs into them.
            And let’s not forget the Wachowski Brothers, who taught us that some things get shot.  A lot.  In slow motion.  While doing kung-fu.
            What do all these things have in common?  And what do they have to do with weight?
            Well, let’s think about it.  Doc Brown and Marty didn’t think everything was heavy, just a few key revelations that came to them across three movies.  Stephen King doesn’t kill everyone in his stories—all in all characters in his books have a pretty decent survival rate (The Stand notwithstanding).  The Wachowski Brothers might have pioneered “bullet time” and virtual camera array shots in film, but there’s also a lot of stuff in The Matrix that follows basic camera set-ups—master, overs, coverage, done.
            And then there’s the G.I. Joe movie.  Which was cool.  Super cool.  Cool action, cool characters, cool lines of cool dialogue uttered coolly in cool situations.
            Saying cool that many times is kind of lame, isn’t it…?
            Anyway, keeping that in mind, I’d like to perform a simple experiment.  Please pay attention to the next paragraph.  Take notes if you feel it might help you recall things.
            LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA!!!!
            So… what parts of that stood out to you?
            Odds are none of it did.  Well, maybe the fact that it ended.  In fact, you probably skimmed it, didn’t you?  Any sane person would’ve.  It was a bunch of LAs, that’s all.
            Here’s another example, one which will probably drive my point home.  Have you ever heard a tuning fork?  Have you ever felt compelled to listen to one for hours?  Tuning forks are perfect, y’know.  If you have a middle-C tuning fork, it will hit that note and hold it for ages.  Why wouldn’t you want to listen to constant perfection?
            Because it’s boring!
            A tuning fork plays one note.  That’s it.  It’s the musical equivalent of LA LA LA LA LA LA.  Middle C is great, and any musician will tell you it’s invaluable to performing almost any composition, from Ludwig Beethoven to Lady Gaga.  But it isn’t the only note.  It’s important because it’s part of a system of highs and lows that we call music.
            Stories work the same way.  A story that’s just all the same thing is the literary equivalent of a tuning fork.  It’s neat for about a minute and then it starts to wear on your nerves.
            Comical and serious.  Loud and quiet.  Horrific and reassuring.  Thrilling and mundane.  Failure and success.  If you look at any good story, you’ll see that it swings back and forth between extremes in a series of low troughs and high peaks.   
            Yeah, The Matrix had tons of kick-ass visuals and amazing action sequences.  It also had a scene of Neo getting berated by his boss, mocked by an old woman in a kitchen, and a lengthy discussion about the true nature of “Tasty Wheat.”  Some of these scenes were vitally important to the plot.  Others were just interesting character moments.  They all had different weight.
            This is what the creative folks behind G.I. Joe didn’t get.  You can’t have all cool lines and allcool action all the time in a story.  If everything is set to ten, it all has the same weight.  Another way of saying “all the same” is that it’s monotone.  And monotone is boring.  It’s boring whether it’s all set to three or five or ten or eleven.
            Y’see, Timmy, it’s the back-and-forth, up-and-down nature that makes for interesting stories.  A good story has a baseline that the reader can relate to.  It’s going to have pitfalls that sink below that baseline, and maybe some really tragic potential consequences.  And it’s going to have some parts that grab the reader’s attention, shoot high above the line, and make the heart start pumping.
            Because if it doesn’t have these back-and-forth elements, if it’s all the same, then it’s just a line.  It doesn’t matter how high the line is.  It’s just a flat line.
            And I’m sure most of you know what “flat line” is another term for…?
            Next time, I have three things I’d like to talk about.
            Until then, go write.
actiondialogueGI Joestructuretone

Categories