Remind Us Who Is Who

Recently a read a scifi novel and couldn’t keep up with the characters throughout the story. Having an interesting and memorable character name is important, but that’s not enough. I just hate it when characters are names things like Bill, Bob, Bert, Bull, Barren, Berry, Bo, Blue, and Brad. It may seem cute to the …

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Corpse In Canyon

A CORPSE IN CANYON By Jack R. Stanley “Her feet may be in town, but her ass — and the rest of her is in the county,” said Canyon Police Chief Haskell Maddox. “Obviously she was shot in the city — she just fell into the county,” responded Sheriff’s Patrol Deputy Savanna Breeze. “That means …

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Do As I Say, Not As I Do

I give great advice in this blog — but I just don’t always follow it. Take for instance my most recent novel, I hit a “writer’s block” moment — a place where I simply didn’t know what came next. What I did know was what happened after the missing piece. I’ve written before that when …

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It’s All In The Casting

The importance of good or great casting can’t be overstated. This is not only true in both stage and screen productions, but it absolutely applies to the writing process. When it comes to the reality of able actors, it is often possible to switch performers on stage for a long running stage production — but …

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How Much Description Is Enough?

Used to be that writers like James Fenimore Cooper, Charles Dickens and others would take pages to say, “It’s a fall day” or “…in foggy London town…” or “it was a day just like today.” And characters had to be described in such detail that we’d recognize them if we ever saw them walking down …

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Remind Us Who Is WhoCorpse In CanyonDo As I Say, Not As I DoIt’s All In The CastingHow Much Description Is Enough?

Oct 31

E-Publishing Basics

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E-Publishing

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It is absolutely amazing how easy it is to publish your own work electronically on Kindle and Smashwords.  These two are the biggest publishers and while Kindle only reaches Amazon/Kindle readers, there are people with Kindle apps on I-pads, Nooks, Sony Readers and all the other Android, Mac, Windows, and Google tablets out there.  Smashwords, on the other hand, translates your material into the major e-book formats to be read by all the key e-book publishers.

Here’s what you need to know.

First, finish your story.  And by finish I mean not only get to THE END but run the spelling and grammar checker on your work, even listen to it be read to you by your computer (Text Aloud is an example of these types of programs – some computers already have an onboard text reader you can use).  Additionally you need to get someone who is actually good as spelling and grammar to at least edit your work so any readers won’t think you’re a dufus who can’t even get the most basic parts of storytelling correct.

(I say this knowing I am one of the world’s worst spellers and there are most likely spelling and grammar errors in some of my blog post here, even this one.  I’m also aware of the Thomas Jefferson quote to the effect that “I have little respect for a man who can spell a word only one way.”  But this is a case of “Do as I say, not as I do.”  You should understand that I do run spell check and grammar check and listen to my blog post being read aloud to me before I post them.  But I, like you, know what it’s supposed to be and don’t always hear, much less see, the mistakes.  At least I try and I hope you do better than I do.)

Here’s the deal, when people who don’t know you read your material and stumble across spelling and grammar errors, they begin to discount everything else in your work.   I know a reporter who makes it a habit to read every newspaper he reads (and there are a lot of them) with a red pencil in his hand to correct errors he encounters.  Of course one of the definitions of journalism is “literature on the fly” meaning that everybody knows newspaper and magazine copy is written and published in a hurry – resulting in mistakes.  This is not an excuse and it doesn’t make it right to either the writers, publishers, or readers.

Try your best to get it right before you publish it.

There are editors, professional editors, who will edit your material for a fee.  You can find them on the Internet but you never know what you’re getting unless you know the editor yourself or have someone you trust recommend an editor.  Here again is where a writer’s group can come in handy.

A good editor not only looks for the spelling and grammar, but for story holes, character names that are not consistent, and a myriad of other problems.  You want someone you can trust and who is ultimately helpful to you and not someone who does a quick read, red lines mistakes and thinks you’re an idiot for even writing the kinds of things you do.

There are editors who specialize on every genre imaginable and that’s what you want.  If you get a science fiction editor to edit your romance you’ll most likely not get any story help.

An example of the kind of thing a good editor can do for you is the story about Hemmingway’s editor who told him that his novel, FOR WHOM THE BELL TOLLS ended when the main character died.  Hemmingway had written an additional three chapters to the book but instantly understood what his editor was saying and agreed.  He told the editor to just cut the last three chapters and that’s the book we have today.

All of the above is Step 1 — Getting Your Story Finished.

Now, Step 2 has to do with Formatting.

All I can advise you about is how to format straight words and paragraphs without graphic, drawings or illustrations.  There is some excellent advice on how to add graphics of all kinds in the Smashwords Guide (available on-line for free).  Even adding little things, like a first letter of each chapter which is bigger or different from the rest of you book or story, or adding a cute little curlicue at the end of each chapter becomes more involved than I want to deal with here.  All this can be done but you’re adding work for yourself if these little things are important to you.

My advice is first learn how to publish a simple straight forward novel or short story, stage or screenplay before you look at what else is possible.

Your life is going to be one hell of a lot simpler if you write in Microsoft Word.  You can use anything from Word Perfect, to Open Office, to Movie Magic Screenwriter or Final Draft, but eventually you’ll have to get it to MS Word to easily handle your e-publishing.

Long time TV anchor and reporter, David Brinkley, wrote about a dozen books using the old word processor Word Perfect 4.2.  For years his son’s kept trying to get him to switch to M.S. Word or even the Mac word processor.  His response was, “Why should I?  Word Perfect 4.2 works for me.  It does everything I need to do and it does it easily.”  His editor and/or publisher most likely transferred Brinkley’s books to MS Word because it is kind of the industry standard, but the writer didn’t have to do it.

If you’re self publishing, you’re going to have make the change.  You can still write in whatever program you like, but there should be a way to “Save As” if not Word, then RTF (Rich Text File) which will preserve all your paragraphing so it is readable by MS Word.

The reason for using or translating to Word is that’s what KDF (Kindle Direct Publishing) uses.  The other major publisher, Smashwords, uses M.S. Word ’97-2003 or Word XML Document which you can save from Word and from several other word processors as well.

When you read the Smashwords Guide (a must read) you’ll find out that you need to get down to a single font, and single paragraph style.  You might be in love with some exotic font, but e-book devices don’t read all fonts and don’t read them equally as well.  Smashwords recommends New Times Roman as your font.

Here’s something to understand.  One of the major drivers of the e-publishing phenomena is that older readers were the first to fell in love with the resizing of font feature of e-book readers.  And since older reader tend to read more than younger readers, that has driven e-publishing until it has become what MP3 is to music and CDs.  After a great deal of experience and research, New Times Roman has emerged as the easiest font to read over all.  Courier New is also popular but in side by side test, New Times Roman has been found more readable in all different sizes.  And, bottom line, getting folks to actually read your book is still your goal.  So why invest yourself in any font that may work but will turn off some readers.  You want to attract readers not just to one work but to multiple books, plays, or short stories.  So, don’t pick a font to spite your reader.

The next part of the formatting issue is paragraph style.  You can indent the first line of each paragraph or separate each paragraph like a business letter and start each paragraph flush left.  All e-book readers are looking for is consistency.  The only command e-publishing really wants is paragraph returns, centering, and a few forced page breaks.  Remember with the changing of font sizes, where your pages break will vary from e-reader to e-reader.  You’ll want to force a page break after your title page, your copyright page and after “THE END” before you add your “About the Author” and other publication lists.  That’s all.

This means that you need to go through and stripe out all print definitions and leave only those three – unless you’re willing to deal with adding graphics.

Step number 3 is that you’ll also need to create the book cover for your short story – yes this is a book – book, single short story, collection of short stories, or play.  Again Smashwords has some wonderful advice about doing this.

Here’s the short version of what you need to know about it.  The pixel size of your image is important and the catchiness and readability of your image as a thumbnail will help or hurt your sales.  A JPEG image is what both Kindle and Smashwords wants.

Remember, this is going to be an electronic publication and most people will encounter it on a page with several other thumbnail size images of other book covers.  Does yours jump out?  If it only looks good full size and the a mess when squeezed down, you’ll need to make some changes.

If you want to do this yourself, you can find some wonderful and free images on the Internet and you can even buy the rights to some copyrighted images for a few bucks at some other sights.  Contrary to the best advice, people do judge books by their covers.

So, now you have your text finished, edited, and formatted, and your cover.  The only other element you’re missing is one of the most important.

Number 4 has two parts.  You need (1) a short description of your work and (2) a longer description (Smashwords requires both, but Kindle only requires one – you can use your longer description or the shorter one for Kindle.  You decide. Spend a little quality time making your descriptions leap off the page and grab the reader without giving everything away.

Armed with these four items, your finished and edited text, properly formatted, your cover, and descriptions of your work (one short, one long), you’re now ready to create free accounts on both KDP (Kindle Direct Publishing) and Smashwords so you can upload your book and be published.

Yes, that’s all there is to it.

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Oct 18

Back Secrets

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Characters

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Lately I’ve been enjoying a relative new series of mysteries based on Agatha Christi novels featuring her amateur sleuth, Miss Marple. What has struck me is how important the back story, or rather the back secrets, are to many of Christi’s characters.

A back secret is a character’s hidden back story which altered their character because of deeds done (sometimes out of ignorance, anger, spite, guilt, lust, or greed), secrets kept, or mistakes made. These events, whatever they are, have had a profound impact on the characters for the better or, usually, the worst but have been the prime catalyst of making the character whom he or she is by the time of the story.

These are the kinds of things characters are running away from or are trying to live down. They are also the factors which help make more complicated and interesting characters.

Here are some example of secret back stories that might well make for fascinating characters. Imagine a character who:
was the witness to a horrible crime or accident but was afraid to ever tell anyone because of who was involved;
is ashamed of the suicide of a close relative (parent, sibling, cousin, etc.) or just a witness to the event;
is guilty but undiscovered, of a crime or is responsible for a significant accident;
because of a lie told, events lead to a disaster in another person’s life;
had sex with relative of current partner (happens a lot more in real life than I would have thought);
aided the enemy (not just in wars, but across culture or class lines);
used to be poor, now rich or vica versa;
“passing” of any kind (gay/black/transgender/class);
deep shame over ethnic or sexual roots;
a parent who favored one kid over the other or the either child under such circumstances;

Here are some specific examples – the kind of thing worth keeping a file of for your writing, not necessarily for a project at hand but one you’ll write in the future.

A minister has an affair with a young woman but decides to break it off because he’s tired of her, or some other trivial reason, and the woman kills herself over the rejection.

A man as a teenager accidentally started a forest fire that claimed the life of several innocent people.

A salesman who used to drink a lot, killed a child driving impaired. He was punished for it (perhaps this was back before the penalties for such crimes were as severe as they are today). He has moved on with his life only to be haunted by that memory for the rest of his life.

Someone who is *not* guilty of a minor crime of some sort, but who took the blame to protect someone else in the past. If the protected person later went on, say, to commit murder or other more serious crimes, the one who took the blame for the earlier offence is then responsible to some degree for the later offences.

Jokingly exposing a hidden truth about a friend or family, leading to the loss of a job, status, fortune, or whatever – even loss of life.

One of the good uses of back secrets is to explain the behavior or motives of a character in your subplot if not your primary storyline. Maybe a secondary story where the girl helps someone else out of a situation that has parallels your main story and a non-obvious way.

Failing to act can be a back-story secret, but it’s dangerous if you’re not careful. Particularly new writers who are not aware, can create circumstances where what they make a “passive” character instead of an “active” one. This happens where thing happen to the character and thus he or she becomes the victim rather than being a person who takes their own life in their hands and makes choices and takes actions which impact not only his/her life, but also the story. If the character in question is a compulsive over- compensator (active) – for example because he/she once let a friend die (in battle, didn’t give help when asked, etc.), for example, this can be a powerful thing that makes a seemingly passive action into an active one.

Usually late revelation of the back secret keeps the unexplained characters actions and attitudes mysterious. Once revealed, the value of the back secret is spent. Its value comes in carefully revealed by seemingly unrelated hints which all come together with a bang at the end.

Noticed the importance of:

Crimes
Accidents
Guilt
Blame
Shame
Sex
Truth
Riches
Power

Build your own list and collect examples as you see them in life around you, stories your read or see or ask yourself, “Why would someone possibly do that?”

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Oct 17

CURB YOUR ENTHUSIASM

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The Writing Life

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    Probably the biggest mistake beginning writers make is to share their material before it’s ready. That means, before it’s completed. DON’T!

     You only have a certain amount of energy, enthusiasm, and interest in anything you write. You can either pour all that into the work or squander it little at a time at cocktail parties, beer busts, e-mail, or phone conversations. Every time you tell someone about your story, you are subtracting some of your ability to tell that story on the page by telling it, pitching it, or hinting about it, to others.

     First of all, why waste that energy or enthusiasm because that’s what you’re doing when you talk about your work. Dorothy Parker, one of the world class wits of the early 20th century used to say, “I hate to write, but I love to have written.”

     Every writer can identify with that thought because having finished and published something, or had it produced if it’s a play or screenplay, is so much more fun than sitting in front of your computer with a blank page looking back at you. Myself, I’m one of the few who actually loves to write. I identify with Sir. Noel Coward who once said, “Work is much more fun than fun.” Coward, novelist, playwright, screenwriter, actor, and director, enjoyed what he was doing with his life and I share the view. I don’t dread the time I spend putting a story together or the research it takes to come up with characters, plots and titles.

     Still, the point is, no matter if you love to write or hate it, you can only do it if you have the drive and the enthusiasm to actually apply your butt to the chair and your mind to the task at hand. Pittle away your interest and you’ll end up with a whole drawer or filing cabinet of unfinished work no one wants to look at. It’s the finished work that you can edit, rewrite, rework and reshape into a masterpiece.

     This is not easy to do. If you love the story or characters you’re writing about you want to share it, but it is a calamity to never finish what could be the best work of your life because you can’t keep your mouth shut.

     You have to understand how vulnerable both you and your work are in the early stages. No one else knows what you have in mind with your story and there’s really no way you can get it across without giving away everything that’s in the story. You do that and you’ve all but killed the story for yourself. Why finish writing something you’ve already discussed in detail with other.

     (That’s the problem with Hollywood’s way of developing stories through and extended process that begins with a story pitch and the is mauled in a series of story conferences with the writer not being in charge of the story but being merely the scribe of the tale that survives what’s known as “development hell.” See the beginning of the movie “The Majestic” with Jim Carrey to see this process in action.)

     To paraphrase the boxing rule, “Protect yourself at all times,” protect your story at all times. Telling your story to people who are not on the same page as you. can kill your drive to tell this story because someone didn’t like it. But this has happened to every successful writer who has ever lived.

     When I used to teach screenwriting, one of the first things I would tell my students is that I may serve that purpose in their life. I’d then add, “Take my comments with more than a grain of salt, perhaps as much as a shovel full.” I was very open about what kinds of stories I like and what I don’t like but still encouraged them to write whatever it was that they wanted to see in a movie. I warned them that there will always be someone who supposedly knows what they’re talking about who will treat you like Charles Schultz cartoon character Snoopy who kept getting rejection slips tell him to stop writing, burn his typewriter, and never tell another story as long as he live. Snoopy’s reaction was always something like, “Standard form rejection letter.”

     You need to know what is acceptable to your potential audience these days in your type of story. Shorter sentences, paragraphs and chapters are more the “thing” in these days of electronic books. If you try to write like Dickens or Shakespeare or any of the classic writers of old, you’ll find you won’t reach today’s audience. Those great writers were speaking to the people of their day and you should write for your audience, too, and not for and English lit class. But do so in your style and the way you tell stories as well as your choice of words.

     James Fennimore Cooper (Last of the Mohicans and others) could take four pages to tell you it was a fall day. Today’s reader expects the story to jump off the page in the very first lines of the tale. Mystery writer Mickey Spillane from the 1940 through the 60’s used to say, “The first page sells the book; the last page sells the next one.”

     All of this is about style but it amounts to nothing if you’re story isn’t done. Finish it. Tell it or show it to no one, unless you can trust someone to be on your side.

      But be aware of well meaning friends who will want to tell you only good things when there may be, in fact, things you can fix and improve. That’s where a writers’ group comes in.
A writers’ group can be as few as three people of equal standing who are working their way through a project or a larger group with a scattering of talent and levels of experience. A writer’s group is all about, “I’ll show you mine if you show me yours.”

     Find a writers’ group of other who share your passion and frustration or create such a group. Then you’ll have folks to share with who can be more helpful than destructive.

     Your take-away from this piece — you and your work are very vulnerable when it’s still in process. You need to protect both yourself and your work at all times but especially until it’s finished. Find or start a writers’ group if you simply can’t keep it to yourself.

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Jul 28

WHAT’S AT STAKE

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Plot

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At ground zero your story is about your Main Character (MC) who has a goal.  How compelling, gripping, and powerful your story is depends on two things: (1) what your Main Character has at stake in pursuit of the goal and (2) how much the audience cares about this character.

 

To discover the value of the quest, answer one simple question: what happens if this character fails?  If the answer is “not much,” or “nothing important,” or something like “he/she will be disappointed” then you have a story which is of little value and minute significance. Translation: it’s not particularly absorbing.

 

Consider your Major Dramatic Question (MDQ), the uncertainty you place in your audience’s mind as soon as possible or the problem, which will take the whole script to answer satisfactorily.  Consider a MDQ like these:

 

Will the MC find the treasure?

Or

Will the MC fall in love?

Or

Will the MC get even with the person who “done him wrong”?

 

The audience’s response to these problems is likely to be, “Who’s gives a damn?”

 

The less consequential your MDQ is the more meaningless your story.

 

Examine your MDQ and see how it measures up.

It’s going to take millions of dollars to make a film of your script.  Why would anyone want to spend that kind of money on a story that changes very little in the life of the main character or the world at large?

 

You will improve the salability of your script by understanding what’s at stake and by upping the stakes.

 

Life and death are usually some of the most powerful of stakes.  Even then these consequences can be very limited and their influence slight if only a very few people are ultimately effected by it.

 

The stakes of your story operate on two levels, (1) the public and (2) the personal.  In the beginning many writers focus their thinking on only one level.  By itself, neither level has the power both have when applied jointly.

 

PERSONAL LEVEL

 

What the Main Character initially wants, the love of a desirable person, to find lost treasure, to get from point A to point B, or whatever, is often rooted in a very narrow perspective, that of the Main Character alone.  This goal may well, and many times does, change in the course of the story.  Regardless of the Main Character’s original objective it is the audience’s response that is the key to the stories success more so than the particular goal.

 

Goals great or small connect with an audience primarily based on how the audience feels about the Main Character.   Sympathetic characters draw the audience in and make them both identify with and care for such characters.

 

The writer should find a way to depict something benevolent, congenial, compassionate, and/or likable about the Main Character as soon as possible.  It is the audience’s understanding and identification with the Main Character that makes whatever the MC seeks to be of value to the audience.  The simple true is we care about the things and the people whom we know, understand, and care about.  If the audience doesn’t know or care about the MC, then they couldn’t care less what’s important to the MC.

 

It doesn’t matter if your Main Character is a criminal, a fool, dirty, or disgusting if the audience can see more to this character than the negative, and, in fact, know endearing, positive aspects of this character, a sympathetic character can be created.

 

This is especially true when creating your villains.   A well-rounded heavy is a character who is not bad all the way through but someone who also has good points.   And when you have a villain who is sympathetic it deepens the conflict of the story because it’s no longer a simplistic clash of right vs. wrong.  This complicated and more realistic conflict also gives the writer more options.

 

 

PUBLIC LEVEL

 

At the public level stories deal with broader subjects and focus beyond the individual Main Character.  These are stories with possible dire consequences to:

 

  1. the family (real family or family of close friends, associates, or improvised family)
  2. the community (tribe, village, town, state, region)
  3. the nation
  4. the world
  5. the solar system
  6. the galaxy
  7. the universe

 

These stories are still about choices an individual makes, but the actions and decisions have powerful impacts for good or for ill on a larger world.

 

Synchronizing Personal and Public Stakes

 

When what the MC wants at a personal level connects with a public goal, the significance of the private stakes is automatically raised.  If finding the treasure or falling in love also impacts a wider purpose (saving the family or uniting the nation), suddenly the MC’s goal is magnified exponentially because of its wider ramifications.

 

 

Conflict Between Public and Personal Stakes

 

When what the MC wants personally conflicts with a greater public good, then the consequences of every action the MC takes is magnified throughout the whole story.  If, in the end, the MC has a chance to win his primary objective but at a cost of a significant public goal, and if the audience is torn as to which object it wants to see realized, the writer has been able to engage the audience at a very fundamental level.

 

Compound The Stakes

 

Sometimes it is not possible to convincingly intensify either the private or the public stakes.  In such a case a better strategy might be to simply attach other problems (perhaps related, perhaps not) to the original difficulty.  The sheer weight of the tribulations will frequently serve to raise the stakes.

 

One way to compound the stakes is to suddenly shorten an already established and dangerously tight time frame for the Main Character.

 

Another method of increasing the difficulty for your MC is to diminish available resources.  A sidekick, confidant, or indispensable guide can be eliminated (lost, incapacitated, killed, or proven to be the very opposite of what this person was perceived as being).

 

Things That Matter

 

The story telling arts are one of the primary ways every culture reinforces its values.  These values, these truths, are part of what attracts us to stories in the form of books, plays, and films.  Classic stories in every form are those which move audiences and even challenge them to live better lives with renewed understanding of the things which make us human as our best.

 

Writers whose aim is revealing to the public all the ugliness, filth, and meaningless of life are usually disappointed at how little resonance their tales have with audiences.

 

Conversely those who focus on those aspects of bravery, friendship, fidelity, honesty, kindness, love, generosity, respect, and trust, often discover they have struck notes with audiences well beyond what the writer ever suspected.

 

Stories of seemingly trivial events can be magnified when the MC represents the greater values of human life in the face of overwhelming odds and in spite of all logical arguments to the contrary.  Those who believe when all the others have lost their faith, those who keep their word when it would be so easy to do otherwise, and those who are steadfast in the most basic of higher values even in the face of death are all characters audiences admire, identify with, and care about profoundly.

 

If you can make your MC stand for a key human value (and there are others beyond those listed above) in the actions and decision made in the story, you will elevate both your character and the stakes of your story.

 

How To Raise The Stakes

 

The simplest key to raising the stakes is to significantly increase the appalling outcome if the Main Character fails to reach his/her main objective.  Consider consequence on both the personal and public levels.  Keep in mind how important it is for the audience to care for and identify with the MC.

 

Consider synchronizing or conflicting the private and public goals to maximum effect.

 

The writer’s task is always to make it harder, never easier, for the MC to achieve the manifest target.  By making the MC suffer, and suffer greatly, the MC becomes nobler and more heroic in persisting in the mission of the story.  Compounding the MC’s problems is a sure fire way of doing just that.

 

Does your MC stand for a greater human value?  Do the actions and decisions the MC makes reflect this value?  Doing so insures a more significant story.

 

In the end you will have to come to grips with the reasons that drove you to want to write this particular story in the first place.  What was it that this story says for you?  What is the point of the story?  This tale is a parable that, at some level, speaks for you in saying something that you believe very deeply.  What is that basic truth?

 

Knowing what it is you are really saying with your story (your theme) will at the same time give you distance from your characters to enable them to suffer greatly and empower you to create the most forceful story you can to make the point you want to make.

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Jul 23

Character Basics

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Characters

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A character is any person or thing with a human personality or trait in your story. Often we talk about the “good guy” vs. the “bad guy” or the “hero” or the “heroin” against the “villain.” Characters are also referred to as “A” and “B” or “C” and so forth. We’re also familiar with the “comic relief” character, the “roommate,” the “BFF”, down to character with just numbers, “cop # 3” or “reporter 5”, etc.
This isn’t really what we mean when we’re talking about character. A true character may be a lot like ol’ Jim, or Uncle Carle, or Grandmother. But to be a true character who will help you with your story you need unique individuals with likes and dislikes, goals and disappointments, unique qualities developed over the course of a life time, even if that life time has been very short by the time we meet the character.
You can find elaborate lists of character question you and go down to help you define your characters and your own style of developing a individual who holds our interest each time he or she appears. There are some writing gurus who will ask you what your character had for breakfast this morning? To me this is a little too much. I understand that my characters only exist for the period of time they are in my story or script and most likely ate New Times Roman, point 12 font size for all three meals.
One of the things I learned from writing my dissertation about the writing of the radio and TV series “GUNSMOKE” was how the writers from co-creator John Meston to those who followed him would often name an episode after the key character of the week. And these names were always outside the ordinary but also memorable.
Over the years I’ve made it a habit of collecting interesting names and I have lists I go back to as well as add to all the time. What I’ve discovered is that once a character has a name, it becomes easier to think of him or her as real and create all the other factors they need to pop off the page and the screen.
There are limits to the value of this, as with anything else. Think of some of the jocks and celebrities whose names are hardly pronounceable to those singing groups whose names are so obscure the leave you scratching your head instead of admiring their cleverness and thoughtfulness. (Some of you will remember when the singer Prince went through the phase when he was using a symbol for a name and calling himself, “The Artist Formerly Known As Prince.” Eventually he wised up because that took up too much billboard space and disc jockeys had other things to do than take the time to I.D. him in such a convoluted way.)
Another approach is, in effect, to name your characters with such common names that they are “everyman” or “anybody.” John Jones, Betty Smith, and the like.
Still one more point about names. This is usually more important in scripts than in prose but it still applies. Try to use different letters of the alphabet to name your primary or significant characters. Parents may find it cute and neat to have all their children with names that start with the same letter, Collin, Christian, and Calab, but, trust me on this, when your speed reading (as most professional script readers do) you quickly confuse one “C” character with another because you don’t really take the time to read all the character’s name. A much better strategy is to keep an alphabet handy and go to a different letter for your next name.
I’ve spent a lot of time here on naming the key characters. But to truly make a character really round as opposed to flat it’s more important to have characters who are human, meaning that they are flawed. If you have a Superman who is never wrong, makes no mistake, and cannot be defeated by anything (no Kryptonite) then this is a very thin, unrealistic, cardboard character without depth and with nothing to learn. Remember, in a good story the main character is a different person at the end of the story than he/she was at the beginning because they have grown, faced a major fear in their life, and have altered who they are forever by their actions and decisions. A person with nothing to learn, nothing to overcome, nothing to face, makes a poor character, “good guy” or “bad guy.”
What is the one thing in this world your major character does not want to deal with. Make him or her deal with it in spades. Remember Indiana Jones? “Why did it have to be snakes?” It had to be snakes because that’s the one thing he was most afraid of — and it wasn’t just a couple of snakes but hundreds of snakes he had to face.
What is your character’s physical or mental defect? Is he a recovering alcoholic, is she a former hooker, or does this person have an unreasonable fear of fire, water, heights or something else. Think of the TV character Monk.
In your story your character reveals himself and his weakness, although he has done his best to hide from it and keep it from being known by anyone else. That’s what stories do — they reveal character.
So, it behooves you to create characters who are interesting and contradictory in their hiding mechanisms and who they presents themselves to be to the world and in who they becomes once he face his fears.

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Jul 19

The Basics of Plotting

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Plot

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By definition, plot is the construction or linking together of events which tell a story. In its most basic form, there are three parts to it (1) the beginning, (2) the middle, and (3) the end. It’s like a joke, except that a basic joke is said to have just two parts, (1) the set up and (2) the punch line. In fact, the set up of a joke is the beginning and the middle which leads to the end.

Like a joke, if you give away the ending first, there’s no pay off or satisfaction because the audience knows where the joke is going. We’ve all known people who will ask if you’ve heard the joke about such and such (the punch line), and if you say, “No,” they then tell you the joke but you’re already ahead of them and know where the joke’s going. So, when the teller of the joke delivers the punch line again, it’s not very funny.

The same is generally true with a story (although there are exceptions). Knowing the ending, unless the story teller is very clever, the audience knows where the tale is going before the teller gets there.

Both good story telling and joke telling involve a surprise at the end. With a joke you require the audience to make a leap to connect double meanings to the words of the punch line, or to infer actions only vaguely referenced in the set up. The best story tellers are constantly surprising us with what’s in each event or scene, where each scene or event leads us, and ultimately to an unexpected conclusion that both surprises us but also satisfies us given all the information of the events, places, characters, actions, and dialogue of the story.

Wit in the dialogue, contrasting locations, costumes, characters, and their actions all make for a more interesting story than A meets B, A falls in love with B, and then A and B live happily ever after.

If A meets B and they take and immediate dislike to each other, then A and B are stuck together because of unexpected events, and finally A and B discover they are perfect for each other in spite of everything they both thought or believed because of something that happened when they were together, this is a more interesting story.

Still if you change the ending of the story so that A falls in love with B and asks B to marry A, but B refuses, then A kills B and himself, that’s more surprising. It’s not necessarily a more satisfying story but the twist would be unexpected.

If you add another character, C, to the mix, you could have a tale where A meets B and dislike each other, C decides to put A and B together, and then A goes off with C, you have another twist.

Here’s the first point. Stories are about one character; A. You may have A, B, and C who all go to Paris to find love and we may follow all three stories, but A is our principal character. We need to be more interested in A and concerned about what happens to A no matter what happens to B and C. You can only have one main character. All the others are supporting players.

The way you find out who is you’re A character is to find out which of your characters makes the major decision, takes the most significant action in the story. If A meets B, and then A and B are thrown together by C, and in the end, B and C run off together, this is not A’s story. It’s really B’s story – or even C’s.

The story of Abraham Lincoln is NOT the story of John Wilkes Booth. Now we’re into the world of fiction vs. reality. If you’re trying to tell the story Lincoln’s assassination, it’s not Lincoln’s story unless he makes the decision to put himself in harm’s way that leads to his own killing. In the key scene of this story, who does the doing? Lincoln or Booth? Lincoln is the receiver of the action, not the actor, not the doer.

Even in stories about hesitant heroes, like Hamlet, the story moves forward only when the main character make a decision/takes an action. It is this character’s story because he is doing things, taking his life in his hands for better or worse, and altering who and what he is. That’s the second point. Good stories are not about victims who have things done to them but about those to take hold of life and make things happen.

In classic playwriting, one way to look at it is that the story begins once A, the main character, makes a decision/takes an action involving the second character, B.
Romeo falls in love with Juliet.

This sets up the major dramatic question of the story. Point number three is, what is it we want to know in the story – what’s the major dramatic question? In the case of Romeo and Juliet, we want to know if they can ever find happiness?

Then next significant plot point is another action taken by A with B that creates even more conflict in the story and deepens the major dramatic question.
Î
Romeo marries Juliet.
Still we have the same dramatic question but now it has more meaning; can Romeo and Juliet ever find happiness?

The next turn in the story is when A makes a decision/takes an action with the third character, C.

Romeo kills Juliet’s cousin Tybalt in a sword duel.

Now the major dramatic question has been answered. Can Romeo and Juliet ever find happiness? No, not in this world.

All that is left is the acting out of end of the tale.

Again A takes an action/makes a decision with B.

Romeo thinking Juliet is dead, kills himself.

The major dramatic question is answered in stone. No, Romeo and Juliet can never find happiness in this world.

In reaction, Juliet kills herself, but this is anticlimactic because the major dramatic question has already been answered.

Plots are about three people, A,B and C. A can be the good guy but we must care about him and what he does even if he’s a gangster and a killer, and B can be the bad guy or B can be to love goal of A as in Romeo and Juliet. Basically A wants something and B is somehow preventing him from achieving it (Juliet prevents their happiness because of her family’s hatred for Romeo’s family). C is the third character in the mix that impacts events and ultimately is involved in the course changing scene of the story.

The major actions of the story are taken between A and B with A always being in charge. The action with C is one time A acts significantly with another character, but again it is A who acts upon C, not the other way around.

Bottom line, plots are about events, actions, decisions made by a main character, which the audience cares about, not actions received by this character. These key actions are with a second character. A significant scene in the story involves the main character with a third character that bring about a major twist, reversal, or turn in the story. Then the tale ends in a final action involving the main character and the second character which is both unexpected but satisfying because of other events and information in the story.
Your challenge in plotting is to get from an exciting, engaging, or somehow arresting beginning, through the middle were a lot of character development, back stories, and general information and even philosophy are given to the audience in ways that keep the reader/viewer engaged, and arrive at a non-predictable ending that is true to everything which has come before it and still both satisfies and amazes the reader/audience.

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Jun 26

How To Write

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The Writing Life, Uncategorized

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The first law of writing is: There are no laws.
The first rule of writing is: “Anyone who tells you there are rules is a dumbass!” (My rules are at the end of this post.)
Look on the Internet and you’ll find rules for writing by some very well known, successful writers. Pick any of them, follow their rules to the letter and you’ll be a flop as a writer. You simply can’t do it somebody else’s way. Their way is just that – “their way.” Writing is all about finding out how you can best do it.
There are some guideposts, some logical, common sense, fundamental principles which might be of some help, but in the end, even some of these are not going to work for you.
John Grisham (The Firm, The Chamber, The Client, A Painted House, The Pelican Brief, The Rainmaker, The Runaway Jury, A Time to Kill and others)says you should “Start with action; explain it later.”
Elmore Leonard (Get Shorty, Out of Sight, Hombre, Mr. Majestyk and Rum Punch and many others) believes you should “Never open a book with weather.”
George Orwell (Animal Farm: A Fairy Story, Nineteen Eighty-Four) thought that “Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.”
Mark Twain held that “When the author describes the character of a personage in his tale, the conduct and conversation of that personage shall justify said description.”
Science fiction novelist Robert Heinlein (Starship Troopers, Stranger in a Strange Land, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, and others) said, “Finish what you start.”
I could go on and on. You might find it helpful to Google your favorite author and see if he or she had and rules or commandments for their work. It’s the kind of thing I find reading and knowing very interesting but there are so many exceptions to ever rule that you must keep in mind that “rules are made to be broken.”
You can’t even rely on someone else for the nitty-gritty of how to get your words on the page. Agatha Christi kept 72 lined notebooks with plot lines, story ideas, character names and even questions to herself about who would be the best character to accomplish certain elements in her stories.
I think it was Phillip Roth (Goodbye, Columbus, and Portnoy’s Complaint) who decided that writing on a computer made him too wordy because it was so easy to insert words into a sentence after the fact. Finally he gave up the computer and returned to his yellow legal pad and had a secretary type his material into a word processor for editing.
Many of us have grown up using a computer or at least have made the switch from the typewriter to the computer in their lifetime. (I can remember when I thought the Correcting Selectric typewriter by IBM was the ultimate writing instrument.) So, many writers today are either PC or Mac people. But there are still those who prefer pen or pencil and paper to any keyboard. J.K. Rowlings (Harry Potter) does.
‘Don’t like yellow legal pads? Ever try the blue one? How about the pads that aren’t legal size but just standard or smaller?
Perhaps you’re someone who dictates better than you type. Try one of the speech-to-text programs like Dragon NaturallySpeaking.
I’m currently reading about Agatha Christie and all her notebooks. During WWII when paper was rationed she has to double up and use the back sides of page from previous notebooks and even wrote sideways in the margins sometimes. The big takeaway I have from what I’ve read about her prolific career was that she wished she had been more organized.
In a Distinguished Speaker Series at the university were I taught for 30 years, Larry McMurtry (The Last Picture Show, Terms of Endearment, Lonesome Dove) told the audience he completely left out a major event in Lonesome Dove because he lost the note he’d made to himself about it. He was talking about what would have been an important milestone on the cattle drive in the novel, when the characters should have crossed the track for the Continental Railroad which had been laid only a couple of years before.
This speaks to my point about being organized. Not everyone is and disorganization may be a key to the way you work but imagine leaving out something significant like McMurtry did.
Here are some guidelines that work for a myriad of writers and which may be of help to you. Please take them for whatever they may be worth to you.
1. If you’re going to be a professional writer, treat your work professionally. Show up at the same time on a regular basis (daily or at least several days a week) at your designated place and work at your writing.
2. Know where you’re going before you start. If you’re going on a trip and end up in the Arctic or the desert you’ll need different clothes all along the way. Knowing where you’re going helps you at least pick up what you need as you go.
3. Keep the tools of your trade close at hand all the time. I like 3 X 5 note cards and new Sharpie retractable fine point pins. I have a stack of cards in my vest with a pin at all times, another stack and a pen on the back of the toilet, on my bedside table and some extra cards in the glove compartment of my truck. I don’t have to wake up enough to turn on my I-pad to make myself a note in the middle of the night, and I can scribble down an interesting name or story idea sitting at an intersection waiting for the light to change.
4. Keep track of different projects. I know one writer who uses plastic coffee cans for several novels he has in mind. Whenever he gets a thought for any one of them, he jots a note and drops it into the right can. When he finished his current project, novel or short story, he looks around to see which can is the fullest, picks that one up and dumps it out on the floor. Then he sorts his notes on scenes, characters, incidents, pieces of dialogue, locations and whatever else he’s collected. Then he begins his next story.
5. Don’t stop until you’re finished with a story. I’ve had screen plays in which I’ve reached a point of getting my characters into a mess but I had no idea how they got out of it. I did know that the next scene of the story involved them being somewhere else but I didn’t know how they got there. This could be called writer’s block – but I refused to let this happen. I just put a series of dashes across the page and wrote, “Somehow they get out of this and get to town” and I put another set of dashes across the page under this. Several days later it occurred to me how they got out of their mess, so I went back and plugged that material in.
6. Amuse yourself with what you write. If you don’t keep surprising yourself, you won’t hold the reader’s attention either. Assume your reader is as smart as you are and don’t write down to them.
7. Write about what you know about – but this also means if you want to write about something you don’t know about, research it and get to know it. Edgar Rice Burroughs never went to Africa and yet he wrote the whole Tarzan of the Apes series and he never went to Mars but wrote a whole series about that, too. Of course Burroughs put tigers in Africa when they were only found in India, but that just makes the point about doing your research before you write.
8. Write dialogue the way people speak, not the way they force you to write in “Bonehead English 101.” Author Leon Uris Battle Cry, Exodus, Trinity and others) once said that “English (meaning the study of writing the language in school by teachers and/or professors) has nothing to do with writing.” Writers often use sentences fragments, begin sentences with conjunctions, and end them with prepositions. See William Safire’s Rules for Writers for a humorous look at what teachers of English always tells us.
9. Do understand the basics of English grammar before you submit your work to the reading public. Do you put the question mark in dialogue inside or outside the quotation marks? How do you end a sentence of dialogue when the next paragraph is a continuation of the same dialogue only on a different subject? If you don’t know these things, just look at some example in novels or scripts that have been published.
10. Read what you intend to write. If you’ve never read a screenplay but have seen a great deal of movies, you got to understand how what appears on the screen is written. Especially in screenplay, your understanding of formatting will set you apart as a pro instantly to a producer, director, actor or professional script reader.
11. When you quit at the end of your daily writing period, stop in the middle of a sentence you already know the ending of. Tomorrow you can pick up by finishing that sentences just to get the juices flowing. Some writers like to go back a couple of pages and retype a previous page or two to get back in the rhythm of the story.
12. Don’t do rewrites until you’re through. Get to “The End” or you’ll be polishing the first line or first chapter forever.
13. When you proofread, be aware of the parts you tend to skip over. This is telling you these parts need rewriting – they’re boring you and will do the same to the reader.
14. Give your hero hell. Don’t ever make it easy for the hero to achieve even the slightest goal. The reader is onboard for the struggle so make sure and give it to him. If just the right tool happens to always be hand, this does not help reveal the true nature of your character.
15. The first line sells the book or the script. Go to a bookstore and just go down the line the books of the type you want to read. Open each and read the first line and put the book back up. After 10 minutes or so look back and see which books you want to read – which first line grabbed you. Remember, often, the first line is the very last thing a novelist or short story writer writes.
16. The last line sells the next novel, short story or script. Make it a zinger.
17. If any part of your story goes where it logically should go, that equals boring. Look again at the movie Romancing the Stone. It’s a great example of a story in which every scene goes somewhere other than where you expect.
18. Read a lot of what you want to write. Know what’s going on in your field and learn who else is doing what you’re doing. Only another writer like you can truly understand what it is that you go through to get the book or the script written.
19. Write your own books and scripts, not someone else’s. We all tend to emulate our favorite writers, but don’t try to write what they would write. The world already has or has had your favorite writers and they write or wrote whatever they loved. Why should you do any less. Your best work will always come from your heart. Be true to that.
20. Don’t read your reviews. Reviews are written by people who are frustrated because they can’t write anything but nasty things about the work others are able to do which they cannot. Screw’em.
If any of this helps; great. If not, never read it again. Go make up your own rules and them break them when you find a better way.

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Jun 21

Where To Write

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Writing In General

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Where to write is as important to figure out as when. Like everything else in the writing biz, there are no rules.
I once knew a science fiction novelist who did his best work in a Pizza Hut in Ann Arbor, Michigan, when the place was busy and there were noise all around him.
A similar story is told about Mario Puzo (The Godfather). When he hit it big and was able to build his dream house, he built a writing shack (or room, or outhouse — whatever you want to call it) where he could have solitude to work. After a couple of weeks of being able to produce nothing, he reportedly picked up his typewriter and came back in the house, parking his machine and himself at the kitchen table with all the family activity going on around him at full tilt. Here he was able to write again.
Ian Fleming, creator of James Bond, wrote his novels during his summer break from being a reporter for a London newspaper (The Times I believe). Fleming had a home on the Caribbean island nation of Jamaica – called “Goldeneye” – where he’d do his writing.
An opposite effect kind to story is part of the Russian novelist (The Gulag Archipelago and One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich) and Nobel Prize winning author Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s legacy. After being released from Soviet prisons and allowed to leave Russia, he made his home his home for two decades in the United State. But Solzhenitsyn found himself unable to write in the spacious office of his Vermont estate. Eventually moved into what we would call a walk-in closet where he placed his desk. In this claustrophobic environment, surrounded by his books, he was once again able to work.
Screenwriter Dalton Trumbo (Roman Holiday, 1953, Spartacus, 1960, Exodus, 1960, Papillon, 1973) liked to do his writing in the bathtub. There’s a picture of him doing just that on the back cover of his biography Dalton Trumbo, by Bruce Cook.
Again, no rules. Whatever works for you is wonderful. Perhaps you need a “clean well lighted place”, or a dark secluded spot, or right in the center of the action.
Like I pointed out in my post “When To Write”, Western novelist Louis L’Amour (Hondo, The Sackett series, How The West Was Won and many, many more) said he could write anywhere, any time.
Back when I was Chair of the Department of Communication at The University of Texas-Pan American for eleven years, I was able to produce a screenplay a year for our student produced feature films, as well as all the other assorted academic papers and administrative letters, reports, and documents the position required in my office with the door always open and people constantly coming in and out as they needed (or sometimes just wanted to chat). There were people who were amazed that I got anything done under those circumstances because they required a closed door and the phone off the hook to focus on their task at hand.
There’s nothing wonderful about the way I happened to be able to work, it’s simply the way I am. I don’t advocate this as a style for anyone to emulate and I only point it out as another way of saying, “different strokes for different folks.”
What you need to do is to discover what and where you need to do your best work. Only time and trial will reveal it to you.
The “ideal” setting of a beautiful view, hot and cold running maids (that’s an old joke), with music for an expensive sound system and the latest in computer software could all be totally wrong for you.
I remember a cartoon from one of the writer’s magazines (The Writer or Writer’s Digest ) showing a mother trying to write with a typewriter on a kitchen table while her children ran screaming around her with pots and pans in hand while another sat bawling at the top of his lungs in a high-chair at the other end of the table. The mother was saying something like, “Maybe Irma Bombeck’s kids were just funnier than mine.”

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Jun 02

When To Write

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The Writing Life

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Have you figured out yet if you’re a morning person or a night person?  It makes a difference because morning people often do their best work before God or the sun get up.  Night owls tend to like the relative quiet of the evening hours when the house or apartment is dark and the only sounds are perhaps your music and the clicking of your keyboard.

Finding your timing helps you focus your whole day toward that time when you sit down to work on your latest project. 

There are many writers who haven’t “made it” as a writer well enough to quit their day-job and so rise early before the rest of the family and write before dressing and going to their other job.

I remember seeing a story in “People” magazine years ago about the Western novelist Louis L’Amour (Hondo, The Sackett series, How The West Was Won and many, many more) who claimed he could write anywhere, any time.  There was a picture of him sitting at a typewriter stand in the middle of a busy intersection writing away just to prove the point.

What I’m getting at here is that you should write at whatever time suites you best, but do so in a place that becomes your writing place, where ever that is.  If you are serious about your writing you’ll have to treat it seriously and “get to it” on a business schedule – be that five, six or seven days a week – at the same time.

Here’s the simple mathematics of it.  If you can write five pages a day, in a week you’ll produce 35 pages, two weeks, 70, a month 140 pages.  Nobody “sits down and writes a novel, story or script” in a single sitting.

If, for example, you’re a night person, you’ll be surprised how things you see, read, and hear during the day will help focus your mind down to your writing time.  Those snatches of dialogue, the interesting appearance of someone you saw for just a fleeting second, or a song to just happened to hear during lunch, can all help you keep moving your story forward.

Even if you’re a morning person, you’ll awake with thoughts and bits of dreams that are relevant to whatever you’re doing.

Find your time and train your muse (she works for you, remember, not the other way around) to be there at your appointed time.

I remember a cartoon in “Playboy” years ago of a harried, frustrated writer looking up to see the arrival of his muse looking like she just crawled out of the sack with a mystic lover of her dreams and the writer shouts at her, “Where the hell have you been?”

It really about training yourself to be professional at your craft.  It’s very true what poet, satirist, and wit Dorothy Parker once said, “I hate to write but I love to have written.”  She also said, “The two most beautiful words in the English language are, “’Check Enclosed.’”

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Jun 02

The Good Things About Bad Writing

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Plot

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The Good Things About Bad Writing

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Jack R. Stanley

 

            We’ve all read something not just poorly written, but down right badly written.  And, we remember it. 

The good news is this is the same thing that has happened to some of the world’s most successful writers; one day you could be one of them.  Let me site a couple of examples.

James Fenimore Cooper (The Last of the Mohicans and other Leatherstocking Tales ) is said to have begun his career as a novelist after reading a particularly bad British novel of his period (the 1820’s) and declaring, “I can write better than that.”

The same is said about Alistair MacLean (The Guns of Navarone, Ice Station Zebra, Where Eagles Dare, and other adventure/thrillers from ’55 through ’86).  MacLean was a middle school teacher who enjoyed Ian Fleming (James Bond) and what would today be called techno-thriller type of tales.  He told one interviewer that he took a stack of yellow legal pads home during summer break and wrote his first adventure, HMS Ulysses, still a classic of World War II navel fiction.

You may know of similar stories about other writers.  There are a lot of them around.

In fact, I once attended a writer’s conference in Ft. Worth (Texas is case there’s any doubt) and heard one of the speakers, a woman who wrote romance novels, tell her story.  She, like many women, loved to read a good romance and used to read them all the time – particularly in bed at night.  One night in the course of her favorite pastime while her husband was dozing off, she got so angry at the content of the paperback she just finished that she hurled it across the room where it banged into the wall.  As her husband jerked up as if he’d been poleaxed with a baseball bat, said, “What’s wrong?”

“I can write better than that!”

“Better than what?” he asked.

“That stupid book.”

Evidently this wasn’t the first time she’d made this claim and her husband, being irritate as he was, told her, “Then do it!  I’m so tired of hearing you say that.  Either write something better or shut up!”  And with that he buried his head back in his pillow as she said, “Okay, I will.”

The next day she began writing her novel. When she finished it he showed it to her husband, who told her he thought it was pretty good. So she boxed it up and send it off to Harlequin Romance books.

About six weeks later her husband received a frantic call. When he asked her what the problem was he replied, “They accepted the book.”

Like most men he didn’t get it. “Isn’t that what you wanted?”

“Yes but they also send a letter asking me when my next novel would be ready?”

“So, what’s wrong with that?  Write another one.”

“You don’t understand,” she said.  “There isn’t another one.  That’s all I’ve got.  No more stories, no more plots.”

“Oh, come on,” he told her.  “I’ve read some of those books.  Plotting one isn’t that hard.”

“Oh, yeah,” she cried, “Mr. Engineer?” 

See he was a aerospace engineer working for N.A.S.A.  This was back twenty years ago when that was a great job to have.

“If it’s so easy, you come up with a plot.  I’m afraid to cash this check because it’s part of a multi-book deal.”

So, he took up her challenge and did dream up a plot for a romance and gave it to her.

“Oh,” she said, “I can write that.”  And she did.

In fact, they started doing exactly that.  He’d come up with the plot for a story and she’d write it.  Pretty soon they were doing so well as this and making so much money that he quit his job and they started traveling the world.  They would go visit all the most romantic places in the world and produced novels about places they’ve been and things they’d seen.

The woman and her husband told the writing conference that they had a great life because they loved to travel and to write.

I don’t remember the couple’s name but their story certainly stuck with me.  And the point is, if it hadn’t been for her reading something bad, she and he wouldn’t have been inspired to do something better.

This could be the exact motivation you need.  Read something crappy and then go write something better – and keep doing it.  Careers and made of just such actions and reactions.

 

 

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