writing

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.

only one rule

~ Anthony Lee Collins ~ 8 Comments

Orson Welles said that for every film he set out to make, he always made a plan. He always ended up having to discard the plan because of circumstances, but he always made it.

I think he was onto something, as usual.

In the comments to this post on Tamara Paulin's blog, we were all pledging our fealty to the idea of not rewriting while we're writing the first draft. Then Sonje Jones said, "Here’s where we differ. I will revise my first draft as I’m writing it."

Tamara's response was: "Sonje: Stop it! Stop revising while drafting. Notes only. (Unless it’s working, in which case keep doing it.)"

Which pretty much says it all about rules for writing (it also made me laugh out loud twice, when I read it at night and again in the morning). As I've said before, I think there's only one real rule, the one I learned from my father: "Write well."

I had a plan for the draft I'm writing now. I was going to write an entirely new draft, from scratch, since I was making major changes, and then compare it to the first draft.

That plan lasted for two chapters. The third chapter was turning out rather skimpy, until I realized that most of what belonged in there I had already written. So, I dumped my plan, and started scavenging the first draft for the things I needed.

Always make a plan, but don't get too attached to it. Never follow a plan or a rule if it starts to interfere with the main rule (above).

who knows what, readers wanted, and more quiet people

~ Anthony Lee Collins ~ 9 Comments

Characters reveal a lot about themselves by what information they have.

My favorite "who knows what" moment is in the movie Mystery Train. There's a character named Luisa (played by Nicoletta Braschi). She's transporting her dead husband's body back to Italy, and she's having a layover in Memphis on the way. We see her wandering around, preyed on by various minor cons, and she ends up in the fleabag hotel where most of the movie's action takes place, sharing a room with another woman who has no money. In the morning, they hear a gunshot from another room in the hotel.

The other woman says something like, "Was that a gunshot?"

Luisa says, "It sounded like a .38."

It tells us a lot about her that she has an idea about the caliber of the gun just from hearing the sound.

I was just watching an episode of the old TV show The Prisoner called "Hammer Into Anvil" (I'm working my way through the entire series, again), and at one point Number Two is threatening (as usual) to break Number Six, and he (Two) says to Six, in German, "You must be hammer or anvil." Six understands the German and recognizes that it's a quote from Goethe, and the rest of the conversation shows that he understands the real meaning of the quote while Two does not (anvils break hammers, not the other way around). We know very little about Number Six, but it is telling that he has all of that information.

I've done this type of things in a few places (probably more than a few, actually).

One example would be this scene. Jan Sleet is trying to solve a mystery for a woman named Claudia, but she's also trying to convince Claudia that her (Claudia's) extensive education could be put to productive use. The quote, by the way, is from The Importance of Being Earnest, and it means, "If I am occasionally a little over-dressed, I make up for it by being always immensely over-educated." Which is relevant to their conversation, of course.

It says a lot about Jan Sleet that she can pull both the quote and the translation out of her head (she quotes the play elsewhere also, but in English) and it says at least as much about Claudia that she catches the reference (and, of course, the meaning).

Obviously, you do have to make sure that it's plausible that the specific character will have that information. Otherwise, it's just a deus ex machina, and you'll lose the reader. But, for example, it's already clearly established (and plausible) that Jan Sleet understands French (we've seen her speak Italian and Spanish as well, and we can infer that she speaks Portuguese), and the extent of Claudia's education has already been discussed. As I wrote before, you can't suddenly have Wolverine sit down and play the harpsichord, or write PHP code.

(Sometimes, with a first person narrator, you have to account for what a character doesn't know. One of the mystery stories, "The Rock Band Mystery," is set in a rock band rehearsal space. I know a lot about those types of places, but Marshall was narrating and he knows nothing about such things, so I had to make sure the descriptions didn't include things he wouldn't notice or information that he wouldn't know.)


readers wanted
I'm looking for at least a couple of people who fit the following two criteria:

  • You've never read any of my writing (or possibly very little; depending on what, I may be able to adjust for that)
  • You'd like to read a few chapters and give feedback

The problem I'm trying to solve is this:

  • I'm working on a revision of my third novel
  • My third novel follows the other two, in terms of setting, plot, and characters
  • It has to work for people who have never read the other two

This is not something I or my most regular readers can really determine. So, if you'd be interested, please let me know (email or comment is fine). The chapters mentioned are not yet written, so it will be a while. I'm working on the first one, and they will be posted one at a time.


more quiet people

"The Mystery of the Quiet People" is now posted here. It is complete, though there will be an epilogue at some point. The new parts of the story start here.

you know my methods, watson

~ Anthony Lee Collins ~ 21 Comments

I recently discovered Jo Eberhardt's blog The Happy Logophile, and this post particularly caught my attention: "Crafting Characters – Where Did I Come From?."

My reactions were too complex to fit into a comment, since I both agreed and disagreed, so I decided to respond here.

I agree completely that this is a ridiculous outline for a story:

  • Bob grew up with loving parents. He had 3 siblings – all sisters, and all older than him. He was always his mother’s “little boy” and was spoiled by her and his sisters for most of his childhood. He had a great relationship with his father, and they spent a lot of time fishing and throwing a football around.
  • It was really hard for Bob to leave his family home and go off to college, but he really wanted to be a lawyer. He spent every break with his parents, and one or another of his sisters would often visit as well.
  • When Bob graduated, he went to work at a law firm, and was incredibly successful.
  • Bob decided to become a serial killer, and started hunting down and killing prostitutes.

There are two problems with this. One is that, as it stands, it's a really stupid idea. The other is that it is, in essence, "Richard Cory."

Nevertheless, in every writing class I was ever in, somebody wrote "Richard Cory." Well, they didn't call it that, but that's what it was. I remember the feeling of sitting in the class listening to each person reading their latest story, trying to figure out if this was the "Richard Cory" for this semester. I realize that everybody starts by imitating, but imitating a style or structure is different from writing an obvious rip-off of a very famous poem and song.

Rant over.

On the other hand, I don't pre-plan or make notes about any of my characters. I don't advise against it (everybody has to find the methods that work for them), but it's not the only way to work.

When I first wrote Randi, I just wrote (basically), "A guy walks into a bar talking to himself," and then I started to think that it would be more interesting if he was talking to somebody, somebody that nobody else could see. When I first wrote Daphne, I just thought it would be nice if some of my characters had a pet. I have no idea why she lives her life as a dog. I imagine we'll find out at some point. As I said somewhere, if you ever pressed her for an answer she'd probably do something unpleasant on your leg.

And, most significantly, starling. She has murdered a lot of people, and I have never given an explanation. There is no indication that she was abused in any way growing up (which is pretty much a cliche at this point), and I hope I have made it clear that her tendency toward uncontrollable violence is nothing to do with the fact that she is a woman – that's even more of a cliche. My best explanation is that, as Kurt Vonnegut put it in Breakfast of Champions, there was some sort of imbalance of chemicals in her brain.

Shakespeare famously gave no explanation of why Iago was such a shit. Did Shakespeare himself know the explanation? I wonder. I detailed Orson Welles' thoughts about Iago in this post.

Not that I'm against explanations for behavior, but they don't always have to be revealed, any more than we always know why people act as they do in life. Also, if we rely on some explanation from a character's childhood to explain some unusual actions taken later in life, what about all the other children who suffered something similar but didn't end up murdering prostitutes or whatever other horrendous crime we're describing?

Events have causes, certainly, but those causes are usually very complex, and one of the worst things you can do in fiction is oversimplify things which are not at all simple. Stieg Larsson had some definite weaknesses as a novelist, but one mistake he didn't make in The Girl with the Dragon Tatttoo was to give a pat answer for why Lisbeth Salander is the way she is. More is revealed in the other books (from what I gather from the movies, and I'm certainly not going to read the books to find out for sure), but it's not necessary for the enjoyment of the character.

As I wrote in response to an earlier post on Jo's blog, "Characters reveal themselves slowly, and some aspects they never reveal. A major character in my second novel didn’t reveal her sexuality until the last page. It’s not something she would talk about under most circumstances, and she wasn’t in a relationship at that time. I had an idea of her preference, but didn’t know for sure until it was revealed in the story. I have two characters who were abused growing up, and the details haven’t come out because they don’t talk about it..."

This way of working is only possible when you're a "pantser," of course (one who writes by the seat of his or her pants). When I introduce characters, I usually have no idea whether they'll be major characters or not. The ones that work, that turn out to have a lot of interesting and useful qualities, they stick around. The others fade away. When Ron was first introduced, I knew she'd be back, but I had no idea she'd end up as important as she is. As I wrote about before, Popeye was originally supposed to be a minor character in the comic strip which was eventually renamed after him.

If you're going to plan ahead, with predetermined Major and Minor characters, I'm sure you would deal with this question differently. Which is the point. Different people work differently, and Jo's methods work for her and mine for me, and neither inherently superior to the other. As my father used to say, there is only one rule for writing: Write well.

And I think we can all agree that, whatever processes we use, they are almost certainly less fun than Sonje Jones' process, as she describes here and here.

Oh, and speaking of one project seducing a writer away from another, I have been feeling that, once The Mystery of the Quiet People is done (and new parts begin here), it's time to put the mystery stories aside for now and go back to my actual work-in-progress, my third novel. It's been resting for about four years, and I wouldn't exactly say it's patting the bed and murmuring sweet nothings, but I think this is a good time to give it some concentrated attention.

I have a specific reason for thinking this, not unrelated to this post, which is that I figured out something today. In my first draft, I think I concentrated too much on tying up loose ends from the other novels, explaining things, giving backstory.

I think a better approach is to Tell a Good Story. To hell with explanations, unless they make that story better.

write what you don’t know

~ Anthony Lee Collins ~ 9 Comments

There was a very interesting post over at Laura Stanfill's blog (I've used that phrase before, I know), called "Prostitution, Or Writing What I Don’t Know." The subject was writing things (people, places, times) that you don't know from experience.

As with some other really good blog posts, the comments (26 so far) expanded on the subject and also went off in some other interesting directions (Angela's Ashes, the New York Times, writing to an outline, blocking the internet to concentrate, and others).

One additional point occurred to me, which is that you can leverage the things you do know to bring the readers through the things you don't. For example, why are the monsters and other special effects in the Lord of the Rings movies more convincing than those in the later Star Wars movies? Partly because of all those incredible shots of the (obviously) real hills and mountains and plains. When the monsters appear, you're already accepting what you're seeing as real (since so much of what you've been looking at was real). In the Star Wars movies, everything is fake, so none of it is very convincing.

This is important for mystery writers in particular because, as far as I know, very few mystery writers have ever murdered anybody (of course, and this is an important point, this is true of almost all mystery readers as well). But if you establish the setting and the characters well, by the time you get to the murder you've got the reader on your side (in business-speak, you've got their "buy-in").

Here's an example. This is from "Live Through This," the eighth chapter of my novel U-town. The setting and the events are things that I'm very familiar with, which I hope carries the reader through the parts that are not like anything I've ever experienced.

http://text.u-town.com/utown/live.htm#scene

Characters:
The Band (Kingdom Come):
   Henshaw (guitar, vocals, songs)
   Pete (bass guitar)
   Carl (drums and lyrics)

Also:
   CJ (fill-in lead guitarist, a gang member)
   Jenny (Henshaw's girlfriend)
   starling (Pete's friend, a killer)
   Daphne (Carl's dog)


This post is somewhat of a sequel to my earlier post "What You Know."

bite-sized chunks

~ Anthony Lee Collins ~ Leave a comment

As I mentioned here, I'm looking into the possibility of moving this site to Drupal Gardens, and I happened on another Drupal Gardens site, www.susanmacphee.com, where I saw this article, "A Beginner's Guide To Website Copywriting."

These points are fairly standard instructions for how to write copy for the web (even the New York Times allows a slightly more conversational and informal style on their blogs than they do in their actual articles), but some of them also apply to writing fiction for the web.

When I started A Sane Woman in the late 1980s, I published it in little chapbooks, one for each chapter. It was written for that format, and when I got online around 1990 I found that it didn't really work as a series of short BBS posts. So, I abandoned it (for a while) and started U-town, which was designed to work in short chunks of that size. This is pretty much true of everything I've done since, including the mystery stories I'm writing now.

Drawing the readers in is definitely a challenge (it's a thing that TV has to do much more than movies, for example, since it's a lot easier to flip to another channel than it is to walk out of a movie theater). When I first wrote U-town, the scene of Vicki on the bridge was in the middle. When I was rewriting, I moved it to the beginning, since it is much more intriguing (I hope) than the original beginning.

The "pyramid style" of newspaper writing (starting with "Who, What, Where, When, Why") doesn't mostly work for fiction, in my opinion. Telling a story is different from writing a newspaper article. When we see Vicki on that bridge, we know very little; and things are only revealed gradually throughout the book, including what "U-town" even is.

This applies very particularly in mystery stories, as talked about last time, but I think it's true of fiction pretty generally.


On another subject, I just watched the movie Laurel Canyon, and I thought the performances were good (and, in the case of Frances McDormand, great) but the story was frustrating.

My main complaint is that everything that happens in the movie is pre-programmed and unconvincing, but it doesn't pay off, since the ending is very ambiguous. You can have a loose, lived-in movie that has a low-key ending (Robert Altman did this a lot), or you can have a predetermined movie that leads up to something definitive and pleasing. But you can't have a pre-determined movie (where, as Roger Ebert says, we uneasily begin to sense the presence of the screenplay) that doesn't go anywhere. It's like getting to the end of Murder on the Orient Express and not finding out who did the murder, or removing the last fifteen minutes of His Girl Friday.

Also, the actual scenes of music recording are not convincing if you've ever been in a recording studio, and (as another critic pointed out) all the music they're making sucks. Someone from the record company keeps calling and complaining to McDormand's character that the album she's producing doesn't have a hit single. I'm sure the record company woman was supposed to represent Corporate Pressure on Artists (she usually calls while she's running on a treadmill), but if I was hearing the results of those sessions I'd be worried, too.