Storytelling Lessons

it’s nice to have one television show to follow (part two)

~ Anthony Lee Collins ~ Leave a comment

Well, I’ve watched all of the second season of The Witcher, and it was very good. In fact, there were some lessons to learn in comparison to The Wheel of Time, which is the show I watched right before The Witcher.

So, I guess this is part of my “Storytelling Lessons” series.

 
Storytelling Lessons from The Witcher

1) Be aware of which are your best characters.

I think I wrote about this before somewhere. If your reader wants to know more about A and you’re consistently giving more information about B instead, that’s a problem.

As I said about The Wheel of Time: “The show is a ‘chosen one’ story (definitely my least favorite fantasy trope), and now, of the five possible chosen ones, the least interesting character (by a wide margin) appears to be It.” That was true through to the last episode of Wheel of Time, where my favorite part was a scene between two very secondary characters.

With The Witcher, the core trio of characters, Geralt of Rivia, Yennefer of Vengerberg, and Princess Cirilla of Cintra, are the most interesting, both individually and in various combinations, and they are all played by top-notch actors. There are a lot of good supporting characters around them, but the supporting characters do exactly that: support, rather than outshine.

 
2) Heroes are okay, but you need at least one good villain (I think of this as the “Hitchcock Rule”), and your villains should be at least as complex as your heroes.

This is one of my main complaints about a lot of comic book movies these days (and, for that matter, The Wheel of Time): villains who, for undefined or uncompelling reasons want to conquer, or remake, or destroy the world. Yawn. Also, it’s an interesting contrast with murder mysteries (this just occurred to me): Good mystery stories require a good motive for the murderer(s). You can go with plain old lunacy as a motivation, but it’s difficult to carry off. Ellery Queen managed it several times, but the lunacy in his books was always highly structured — killers who killed according to specific patterns. And lunatic killers can work better in movies, because: acting!

In general, though, understandable motivations are the best. (Orson Welles, however, had a different opinion, which I talked about here in relation to Iago.)

Everybody in The Witcher has motivations, though often hidden ones, including the monsters. Geralt spends some time defending Ciri against various monsters, until she realizes — and then convinces him — that the monsters are indeed trying to get to her, but they actually never try to harm her. (Geralt, of course, expressed his opinion of this idea with a grunt — his most common reaction to anything — but it was clearly an interested grunt.) The last episode of the season was, among other things, a series of revelations of motivations, and hints of some motivations which won’t be revealed until later seasons.

* * * * *

In other news, I’m very close to starting to post a new story. The first part is basically ready to post (well, I’ll probably read it over just one more time…), and I have three more parts more or less ready to go.

storytelling lessons from big finish

~ Anthony Lee Collins ~ Leave a comment

I first discovered Big Finish Productions because I found out that they did audio dramas based on Dark Shadows, starring members of the original cast (at this point I think almost all of the surviving major cast members have done at least a few) .

One time, when a new Dark Shadows CD arrived in the mail, some marketing genius at Big Finish threw in the first disk of a Sapphire & Steel audio. I’d never heard of the Sapphire & Steel TV show (I don’t think it was ever shown in the U.S.), but I played the CD and I was hooked. A supernatural mystery, set on a train, obviously based on Murder on the Orient Express but you have to pay attention because the references are never explicit? Starring the wonderful voices of David Warner and Susannah Harker? I’m there.

(I’ve realized that audio drama is really my favorite storytelling medium, and it’s nice to find contemporary ones. No matter how good Yours Truly Johnny Dollar was — and it was really good, especially when it was on five days a week — the last one was made in 1962 and there won’t be any more.)

So, Dark Shadows led me to Sapphire & Steel, which led me to Professor Bernice Summerfield (because actress Lisa Bowerman was so good in Sapphire & Steel in a recurring role), and so on.

So, two lessons:

1. If you’ve got a long series of stories, you don’t have write a new story after the end of the last one — you can insert new stories anywhere in the sequence.

I’ve written about the Tony and Cassandra mysteries before, and it seems they were popular enough that more were demanded, even though their shared career had a pretty definite ending. So, a new series came out, with more mysteries set before that ending, in the middle of their time together solving supernatural mysteries. Because why not?

I’ve felt a bit constrained recently, in writing about Jan Sleet and Marshall solving mysteries, because then I have to explain where they live and their daughter and so on — which is a lot of backstory to fit into a mystery short story. In a novel it’s not a problem, but it throws a short story out of balance.

So, now I’m writing a new story, set before A Sane Woman — before U-town, before marriage, before their daughter. Back when the great detective and her loyal assistant traveled the world, reporting on wars and solving mysteries and slowly getting the hang of working together.

It’s going pretty well so far.

2. Flip the genders — at least as a test.

A new series that Big Finish is doing is Jenny — The Doctor’s Daughter. Jenny is the “daughter” (a clone, really) of the Doctor.

In the long history of the Doctor, he has been male (well, until now 🙂 ), his companions have mostly been female, and his villains have been mostly male. So, for Jenny’s stories, the people producing the show took the scripts and experimented with flipping the characters from male to female to see what it did. Some worked and some didn’t, but now the series has a female Time Lord (Jenny), who has a male companion, and mostly female villains. I really like three out of the four stories, and I’m hoping there will be more.

If done mechanically, of course, this type of thing can be a disaster, but it can also get you out of a rut in your storytelling. Try it — you can always flip them back if it doesn’t work.

I tried a similar experiment when writing a Stevie One — not to try making the characters women (most of them were women anyway), but to make them explicitly Black (I say explicitly because often I don’t specify race). It was an interesting process.

For more in the Storytelling Lessons series, go here.

storytelling lessons of the hateful eight

~ Anthony Lee Collins ~ 4 Comments

Characters don’t have to be likable.

The eight are indeed hateful. Even with Major Warren, who is positioned as the “hero” (sort of), Tarantino makes sure we know some pretty evil stuff about him — and not just Han Solo-type scoundrel stuff, either.

O. B., the stagecoach driver — and not one of the eight — seems okay, but we learn almost nothing about him, and his (at least relative) niceness doesn’t help him much.

But so what?

Shakespeare didn’t worry about whether his characters were likable (at least as far as I can tell). For a more recent example, see Chinatown. That’s a great movie, and everybody in it is awful.

 
All questions don’t have to be answered.

Is Chris Mannix really the new sheriff of Red Rock? Are there really fifteen more members of the gang? Did the death Major Warren describes really take place? Did it take place in the way he describes?

You can theorize, and come up with some estimates of probability, but you don’t know for sure.

In trying to figure out the answers to the questions above, you can try to rely on following who knows what, and when, but Tarantino explicitly informs us that the characters are having conversations that we’re not privy to. Which makes it even more challenging. And fun.

 
Don’t break a rule partway.

One key to breaking rules is to break them right out in the open. If you try to break them sneakily, you will get caught.

In the classic Western Stagecoach, John Ford had to set up a few shots of the stagecoach that broke the “360 degree rule” (see below). When people pointed this out, Ford became, to say the least, testy (even more testy than usual, I mean).

In the early parts of this movie, Tarantino shows the stagecoach going from left to right in one scene, and then going the other way in the next. He does this more than once — just so you can tell that he’s doing it deliberately.

So much for the rules that they teach in film school. 🙂

 
The 360 degree rule: As I understand it, in portraying three-dimensional action on a flat screen, you have to allow for the viewer’s perception. For example, you’re going to film an actor going through a doorway, going outside. You’re going to show him both inside and outside the house. For the shot inside the house, you set the camera on the actor’s right, so that he’s moving across the frame from left to right.

In that case, you have to set up the camera for the outside shot in the same position, in the actor’s right. If you set up the second shot on the actor’s left, the audience’s perception will be that the actor is now going on the opposite direction (right to left).

Some people try to extend this rule to cover all sorts of other on-screen movement, like a stagecoach racing across Monument Valley, but, as Tarantino shows us very deliberately, it doesn’t apply that broadly.

(Orson Welles used to tell about the first day he heard about this rule, when he was making his first movie. He was so stunned that he shut down production for the rest of that day so could go home and think about the implications of this. Coming from a background as a stage and radio director, it had never occurred to him.)

storytelling lessons from all over

~ Anthony Lee Collins ~ 2 Comments

On one hand, obviously novels are different from video games, and movies are different from comic books, and so on.

But, on the other hand, all of these are different ways of telling stories, and there are lessons you can learn from one form to apply to others.

I've noticed that some different bloggers have drawn storytelling lessons from forms other than prose novels, and I thought it would be nice to collect them in one place.

First of all, my posts have mostly drawn lessons from movies:

Christine Zilka wrote a very interesting post about lessons she learned from participating in a performance art piece:

Jo Eberhardt has started a series about lessons writers can learn from roleplaying games:

Tiyana White wrote about what she learned from a video game:

storytelling lessons from the zombies and vampires

~ Anthony Lee Collins ~ 4 Comments

Continuing from my earlier post, "Storytelling Lessons from the First Class," I decided to post about some things I've learned from watching the Underworld and Resident Evil movies. These lessons apply mostly to writing series, but the last one applies more generally.

For those who may have not seen the movies in these two series (and why not?), I'll say this in brief: The Underworld movies are about a centuries-long war between vampires (who are very aristocratic) and the "Lycans" (werewolves) who used to be their slaves. There's a Romeo and Juliet angle, and some plot elements which seem to have been borrowed by the Twilight books (based on what Wikipedia tells me).

The Resident Evil movies are based on the popular video game series, and they portray a world gradually taken over by zombies.

Both series are centered around strong female warrior characters: Selene (Kate Beckinsale) in the Underworld movies, and Alice (Milla Jovovich) in the Resident Evil movies. Both series have now gone to four movies, with the most recent one in 3D, and the fifth Resident Evil movie is coming in September.

Here are the lessons I've learned by comparing the two series:

1) A series shouldn't be a series of the same thing over and over.

I just saw the current Underworld movie recently, and it had advantages over some of the predecessors (better direction in the action sequences, for example), but it was clearly More of the Same. You liked the earlier ones? Well, here's some more. We might refer to this as Iron Man Syndrome (AKA "don't rock the boat"). Even the look of the movie is the same, that nearly black and white (or black and dark blue) color palette that has been there since the first movie.

The new movie is set in the U.S. for the first time, but everything still looks the same, and also the change is less striking than it might be because it was never clear where the earlier films were taking place anyway. There's less romance and more ass-kicking than in the first two movies (the third was a prequel, not featuring Selene, and so it sort of sits by itself), but it's still just a continuation.

The Resident Evil films have each been quite different. The first was almost all underground, very claustrophobic. The second was in a city, over the course of one night; the third was in a desert and mostly in bright sunlight; and the most recent was in a variety of settings. Throughout the series, the zombies have become less and less of a plot element as the series has transformed into an action-adventure story. So, not just more of the same.

2) Who am I rooting for again?

With the Underworld movies, sometimes it seems we're rooting for the vampires (because the main character in three of the movies is a vampire), though the vampires are pretty rotten to the Lycans and their entire power structure is based on lies. In the third movie, about the slave rebellion where the Lycans freed themselves, we're clearly rooting for the Lycans, but with the new movie we're back with Selene. It seems that ultimately we're rooting for whoever is the star of the movie.

From the beginning of the most recent movie Selene kicks mucho ass, including killing a lot of people (she isn't called a Death Dealer for nothing), but, aside from the badassery of some of the fights, I did start to wonder if all the people getting killed actually deserved it. The whole thing works better if you don't think about it very much (even apart from the fact that the plot of the most recent movie was very confusing – at least until I figured out that they were using the same plot as the movie Ultraviolet, which made it much easier to follow 🙂 ).

With Resident Evil, it's much clearer. The Umbrella Corporation (a huge multinational corporation specializing in consumer products, medicine, viral weapons, and general nastiness) are evil. They (admittedly somewhat accidentally) wiped out most of humanity, and are still experimenting with the same viral weapons that turned most of the world into a zombie disaster area. So, they're evil. Alice (and whatever few survivors are grouped around her in each movie) are generally good, though not uniformly. As for Alice herself, she's my answer when people complain (with reason) that all the current superhero movies are so boy-oriented. Where are the female superheroes? Well, here's one. She doesn't wear a cape and she doesn't have a letter on her chest, but otherwise she fits all the criteria.

3) Challenge your protagonist.

As I say, the action in the most recent Underworld movie was the best so far, but at this point Selene is so powerful (and so pissed off, and now even immune to sunlight) that there's not much tension in the fights. The Lycans she's fighting get bigger and bigger, but you know she'll kick their big shaggy asses sooner or later.

The smartest thing the Resident Evil people did with the most recent movie was de-power Alice right at the beginning. She was originally one of the Umbrella Corporation's bio-weapons, with all sorts of special powers, but this also made her increasingly difficult to challenge. So, Umbrella "took back its property" and left her as an extremely capable soldier. This was, as I say, a really good idea.

This applies more generally. In mysteries, for example, the reader loses interest if the detective is never stumped.

4) Remember the Bechdel Test.

In some ways the most striking difference between the series is that the Underworld movies are basically "Selene and the boys." There are no other strong female characters, and (as far as I can remember) movies #2 and #3 have no significant female characters at all other than the leads.

(By the way, one of the weird thing about these movies is that we never see any female werewolves at all. And nobody ever mentions it. At least the Lord of the Rings movies mentioned the Entwives and the apparent lack of female dwarves.)

The Resident Evil films always have a variety of female characters: scientists, soldiers, a TV reporter, a student, a doctor, a nurse, an actress, a cop, and a girl named Kmart. The women in these movies have many conversations, about many subjects other than men. One of my favorite scenes in Resident Evil: Apocalypse is on a deserted street, in a disabled bus, where three women basically analyze their desperate situation and their limited options, each one bringing different expertise to bear, while the only male character protests in vain that things aren't really as bad as they actually are.

This is not a scene you're going to see in the upcoming Avengers movie, or the last X-Men movie, or pretty much any other mainstream superhero movie that I'm aware of.

storytelling lessons from the first class

~ Anthony Lee Collins ~ 11 Comments

I just re-watched X-Men First Class on DVD and I think there are some good lessons to learn.

There will be some spoilers.

Always remember which stuff is the good stuff.

The first half of the movie is so strong because it's focused on Erik, Charles, and Sebastian Shaw. They are the strongest characters, and their relationships with each other (or, really Erik's relationships with the other two) are by far the most complex and interesting relationships in the movie. The second half is less engaging because more and more time is devoted to the newly recruited X-Men, who are not all that interesting.

The best action scene is in the first half, too (the confrontation between the Coast Guard and Shaw's yacht and how that plays out). Way more compelling than the ending (except, of course, for the final scenes between Erik and Shaw and Charles).

There's been some good discussion of this question ("what is the good stuff?") over at Bunny Ears & Bat Wings, in response to my guest post.

Some things do need to pay off.

As I talked about in the post about Chekhov's gun, not everything needs to pay off, but some things do.

Sebastian Shaw praises Emma's beauty, and then sends her out to freshen his drink (like "a good girl"). Her resentment at this is obvious, but it's never referred to again.

Two of the CIA men talk about getting information about Shaw through "a back channel," indicating that somebody on Shaw's team is really working for them, but this is never referred to again either.

What messages are you sending?

In general, and especially because this is a movie that uses mutants as a metaphor for real minorities, the final good/evil breakdown is unpleasant. Of the X-Men, who ends up on the good side of the ledger? All the generic non-ethnic white men. Who ends up evil? The Jewish guy and the two women. And, of course, the Black guy died early (google "the black guy dies first" to get some idea how predictable this is).

Think through what you're saying.

Throughout the X-Men movies, Charles and Erik debate how humanity and mutants could, or could not, co-exist. Erik always asserts that humanity will try to wipe mutants out. Charles always holds out hope. The events of the movies always show that Erik is right, but the movies never acknowledge this. I gather there will be more sequels, so maybe at some point one of the students will say something like, "Yo, professor, we like you, and we're learning a lot at your school, but, dude, you really need to wise up."


I'll throw in one more.

Sometimes the geeks are right.

Comic book enthusiasts sometimes get worked up when the movies take liberties with comic book stories and characters. I'm pretty relaxed about that, since I realize that changes need to be made, for a variety of reasons. The main thing I want is for the movies to get the characters right, even if the story-lines and relationships are altered.

That was one of the pleasures of the first X-Men movie: it got the characters right (so I didn't really mind the idiotic story). And when I heard that this movie would have Emma Frost (The White Queen), I had high hopes. Emma Frost, at her best, is one of the best characters I've ever read in a comic book. A former villain, still capable of cruelty, she is smart, sarcastic, witty, and complex. (I have a character who is somewhat inspired by her, in fact, though both are really the daughters of Angelique from Dark Shadows.) In the movie, as one critic pointed out, Emma has two characteristics. His words were "bosomy" and "sullen," and that pretty much says it.

What a lost opportunity. At one point, Emma Frost was supposed to appear in the last movie, played by Sigourney Weaver. That might have been something to see. But, of course, a strong female character like that might not have fit that well in such a boy-oriented movie as this one, where the two main female characters spend most of their time trailing along after the men. When Raven says she's been Charles's pet all those years, she's pretty much nailed it – and her solution is to switch her allegiance to Erik instead.

Which is also quite different from Mystique in the comics...

But don't get me started.