Writer Livia Blackburne writes about the way to grab a reader’s interest. The concept of a “knowledge gap” is interesting but not useful for my process. She does a good job covering the importance of context, though. Check it out.
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Let us consider THE TERMINATOR as an role model for expository technique
StandardI am annoyed. And bored. What, you wonder, is annoying and boring me beyond all the things that bug me every day, like the day job or whatever? Books that are supposedly thriller with action and violent clashes, where the author decides it’s vitally, vitally important to explain shit to me.
What about THE TERMINATOR? Let’s see what explanations we get in this movie:
Arnold appears in a blast of unnatural energy, butt naked. He demands random strangers give up their clothes. Stranger stabs him, to no effect. Arnold plunges his hand into the guy’s chest and pulls out his heart.
What has been explained so far? Nothing. But things are happening.
Kyle appears, but is obviously not so superhuman. Linda Hamilton appears as a normal (but stunningly hot) woman, and Kyle starts looking for her. Silent guy steals a bunch of guns from a gun shop (murdering the owner, too) and starts killing every Sarah Conner in the phone book, even showing up at Hamilton’s apartment and gunning down her roommates [1]
Kyle stalks Hamilton, and shoots Arnold. Arnold takes two shotgun blasts to the chest and doesn’t die.
And so on. What has been explained so far, in the manner of “As you know, professor…” exposition? Nada. Among the guns Arnold wanted was a futuristic plasma rifle. Kyle has a nightmare about massive war machines rolling over piles of human skulls. The Terminator-cam shows machine-like readouts.
All that establishes that it’s science fiction(ish) but you don’t hear the whole thing about Skynet, time travel, John Conner, until the car chase is well underway.
Here’s the trick: First, they show the crazy stuff. Then they explain it.
Here’s what they don’t do: They don’t introduce the Terminator by having him describe who and what he is. They don’t have Kyle arrive two days before the Terminator does to chat with Sarah Conner about this threat to her life that’s going to come later. They don’t have a second Kyle-type person show up just after to do the same thing. They don’t open the story by making Sarah face a half-dozen Terminatinos–weak, non-threatening baddies who don’t pose a serious challenge even though they’re armed and she isn’t.[2]
No, they show the weird and the scary, then they explain it.
Now, (obvious-alert!) movies and books aren’t the same thing. They don’t have the same requirements, the same pacing, the same inputs. They’re linear in very different ways. Also, novels can be much more digressive and can spend much more time with setting and secondary characters.
And those are good things. I love that books have this flexibility. But really, if you’re going to write about conflict, fights, action, then don’t spend a bunch of page space expositing without making me interested first.[3]
Simply: Don’t tell me about shit if I don’t care about it yet.
[1] And I’m going to take that song lyric “Ya ya ya ya It’s a mistake” to the grave.
[2] No, I’m not going to name the book.
[3] Yeah, it’s easy to get this wrong. The scenes that were supposed to make a reader interested in teh exposition might not be all that interesting. Maybe the exposition comes to late, or there isn’t enough of it. Some readers think I don’t have enough exposition in Child of Fire [4]; that’s fine. There are no hard and fast rules.
[4] They’re wrong, but I love them anyway.
Randomness for 5/27
Standard1) Five reasons it’s still not cool to admit you’re a gamer.
2) Mr. Know-It-All, I just found out that one of my favorite sci-fi writers is a raging homophobe. Should I prevent my son from reading the jerk’s books? Huh. I wonder who they’re talking about?
3) Weeks ago, we borrowed Cosmos from the library to share it with our son, but he refused to even be in the same room when we started it. I’m pretty sure he thought it was high-fiber. This auto-tuned video made him change his mind.
4) Solar Water Disinfection. via Martha Wells.
5) Alcohol, a burrito, and Captain America. The “real” Cap would never be this big of an asshole.
6) I’m sure this will become a quality motion picture.
7) Best of all: The first issue of Awesome Hospital is complete online!
Every film is created three times
StandardThe first time is when the writer writes the script.
The second time is when the cast and crew shoot the film.
The third time is when the editor assembles the final edit.
Each time the script is recreated, it’s made from a narrow range of materials. The writer has a concept and some characters in mind, plus what they know can be done on film. The cast and crew have the locations and characters in the script. The editor has the footage and sound recording.
And that’s why the movie I wrote, which I saw last night for the first time, was interesting but didn’t really work. I know there were troubles in production–trouble with sound, with actors not showing up for calls, all sorts of things. It occurs to me (much too late to do anything about it) that Terry Rossio’s advice to never write a thriller screenplay in which everything is super-tight and the plot is built scene by scene. If your script is so taut that it comes apart if some scene is changed or dropped, then it’s going to come apart in production because stuff gets changed all the time.
So, the movie isn’t successful. It’s interesting, and I think it would be interesting to people who weren’t involved in the production. Not what-an-interesting-story interesting, but this-weird-shit-is-affecting interesting, if you know what I mean. Because you can’t really follow the story: big chunks had to be dropped, including an establishing scene for a very important character. In this edit, the protagonist’s sister doesn’t turn up until the third act, and you have no idea who she is or why the protagonist is searching her house.
And there are more issues. It’s flawed but interesting and affecting.
When the film gets distribution (even if it’s only on Netflix) I’ll post the script online. Folks might be interested in seeing the changes between the script version and the final film.
And I’m really glad I’m a novelist now. It makes things so much simpler.
Seven books
Standard1) Happy Hour of the Damned by Mark Henry. Reader, I lol-ed. This book isn’t for everyone: it has a very dark sense of humor. It’s raunchy and obnoxious, but the author made the protagonist real enough for me that went right along with it.
Setup: Bitchy ad exec Amanda Feral finds herself transformed into a zombie and has to learn to navigate the secret world of the supernatural.
It was a lot of fun, but the big drawback was the detective plot the book is structured around. At some point I’m going to have to do a post about horror plots and detective plots, and how much better UF would be if there were more of the former and less of the latter. And the detective plot is a drawback here. These bold and forthright characters should be mixed up in a supernatural version of DYNASTY or something, not a (funny) Simon & Simon. Still, a fun book.
2) Carry On, Jeeves (A Jeeves and Bertie Novel) by PG Wodehouse. I finally gave this a try. Setup: Extraordinarily capable valet solves his rich, feckless employer’s problems.
Reading Bertie Wooster’s voice was fun, but the stories didn’t hold my interest. I laughed while I read each story, but in between stories I didn’t have any urge to keep on. These are terrific books for a different reader.
3) & 4) Yotsuba &! Vol 6 and 7 I figured, after Volume 5, that I was going to burn out on these, but it just isn’t happening. Setup: Yotsuba is a five-year-old girl with a single father in modern Japan. That’s it. Like most kids, she’s a creature of intense emotion, and each chapter chronicles her exposure to some new everyday thing: Bicycles, milk, telephones. It’s all slice of life stuff.
Volume six was fun. Volume seven made me laugh like crazy several times. If you’re looking for comics that will just make you feel good, these are them. (They’re kid-friendly, too.)
5) Changes by Jim Butcher. The Dresden Files reaches book 12. Setup: This time it’s personal!
So, the Red Court vampires–the main baddy through the last several books–have kidnapped a daughter that Harry Dresden didn’t even know he had. They’re going to sacrifice her in a huge magic ritual which will kill Harry and have other mysterious effects that can only be puzzled out in the last 80 pages to give extra context to the final act battle.
Here’s the thing: It’s a terrific adventure story. Lots of battling impossible odds. Lots of battling. Tons of it, in fact. Almost too much. This book also brings back plot points from earlier novels–stuff that happened in much earlier books starts paying off now–not that I remember those earlier novels all that well. I don’t retain information like “workmen removed asbestos from Harry’s office in book whatever,” years after I read it. Things like that slide off my memory. For a while now, I’ve had trouble placing some of the recurring characters. With this one, though, the narrative handles that pretty well. I wasn’t lost once.
Also, the heroics have a much higher price for Our Hero this time. Harry can’t skate through with minimal losses on this one–the conflicts are too big and the choices are too hard. I loved that part of it. So it’s a terrific book, but don’t start here.
6) Chasing the Dragon by Nicholas Kaufmann. A slim, punchy horror novel with an urban fantasy flavor to it. Setup: A young woman, the last in a line of dragon slayers, hunts a very old, very nasty dragon. But it’s hard to fight monsters when you’re a heroin addict.
If the protagonist could speak to ghosts or was half-vampire or something, this would be a straight-up urban fantasy. Instead, her only power is the awesome ability to turn her own life into a flaming wreck. The creature she’s chasing across the American Southwest (the setting wasn’t terribly specific, as I remember) is strong, has terrible sharp claws, can raise the dead and breathes fire. It’s a CHILL villain turned extreme, and the story of the character’s battles with it is interspersed with flashbacks describing how she ended up in this life. I’ll admit that I saw part of the ending coming, but what the hell. I enjoyed it.
7) The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency by Alexander McCall Smith. Setup: A woman opens a private detective company in her native Botswana.
OMG, the twee, I can’t stand it. I wanted to punch this book in its cutesy fucking mouth.
I haven’t been online much for the past few days
StandardBusy with crap I can’t/won’t talk about. I’m about 3,000 words into The Buried King and I feel like I’m spinning my wheels–and I’ll be damned if just typing that didn’t give me the idea I needed to revamp the opening of the book.
That means I’ll be restarting this thing for the fourth time, but what the hell. Whatever it takes, right?
It doesn’t help that my brain has been consumed by all sorts of personal shit. How do we change our lives for the better? What’s the next step? Do we move? To another city? Dump a bunch of our crap? Buy a car so we have more mobility?
I don’t know. There’s a lot of uncertainty in front of us. Hell, we’re taking a trip in September, but we can’t even decide where to go. What makes things worse is that I can’t even work out the plot of my WIP on long walks; my thought are consumed with problems big and small, especially the petty annoyances.
More later.
Randomness for 5/18
Standard1) Producer Linda Obst on Why movies suck so much right now. Don’t miss the comics fanboy outrage in the comments.
2) 2010 Best illusion of the year. For best effect, watch the video before reading the article.
3) Robbing from the poor (writer)–how NOTTINGHAM, a script that featured the Sheriff of Nottingham using CSI techniques to track a wanted terrorist and which was the hottest script at auction in Hollywood for a while, became the completely tedious ROBIN HOOD. Aka why modern movies suck part 2
4) You know how neat-freaks have germ pron? This is vertigo pron. Gah! Heights!
5) Why I don’t get Archie comics for my son anymore.
6) via madrobins: A real-life Miss Marple for the internet age. International access to chat sites, fake online identities and suicide pacts. Jesus, this would make a great book (and I’m sure someone is already writing it).
This is not a post about fanfiction
StandardOn my LiveJournal friends list, which is where I do most of my internet reading, yet another fanfic (definition) discussion has exploded. No link, because it’s just like all the others: a pro writer said the usual dismissive things about fanfic. People who’d never even heard of this writer before swoop in to berate her/patiently explain she’s wrong/inform her they’ll never buy her work/tell her they’re laughing at her/etc to the tune of 300 comments.
Jesus, it’s like that old joke about the community where everyone’s known each other so long that they don’t even bother telling the same jokes anymore. They gave each joke a number and shout those instead.
Pro: Fanfic 6! Also 4 and 2!
Fanficcers: 12! 22! 19!
Anyway, I would like to offer a little expertise (not my own, ‘natch) on conducting an argument of any kind. Dale Carnegie, take it away!
Randomness for 5/13
Standard1) Facebook privacy default settings, and how they’ve changed over time, in convenient chart form. I have a FB account, but I never put anything there I wouldn’t put on my main blog.
2) Some folks are still claiming that health care reform will not save any money, and that the claimed savings are the result of budgetary gimmicks. That’s not true, and here’s why.
3) Paging David Prill! David Prill to the white courtesy phone, please!
4) The July 1690 issue of Cosmopolitan.
5) What you see here is a Men’s Room at the Hilton, and I don’t know if I could pee here.
6) Is “indie” authorship finally coming into its own? I’m not ready to go direct-to-Kindle, but it’s still an option. The sad(ish) thing is that I don’t have an extensive backlog of unpublished novels; I cut my teeth writing spec screenplays. Personally, I’m sure as hell not ready to give up on traditional print publishing. Sales of Kindle editions might be profitable, but it’s still a small pond. Growing, but still small. I want my book to reach as many readers as possible.
7) The Onion on childhood obesity.
Game of Cages blurb!
StandardI wasn’t sure a blurb would come in on time to make the Game of Cages cover, but it did! Picture this:
Move the text “A Twenty Palaces Novel” down beside the word “of” and in its place, picture this blurb:
“Connolly keeps you turning pages and wanting more.” —C.E. Murphy
Yeah. It’s a good day.
I’d post the cover flat itself (instead of describing it) but it’s not quite final yet. Soon!