Audiences love watching characters in dire situations work their way out. We want to believe that with enough determination anyone can lift themselves up by their own bootstraps. More than that, we want to believe that people have the power to look inward and turn themselves into someone better.
A character’s growth should account for shifts in his attitude, but if his personality does a complete 180 it will affect his believability.New situations should nurture the hero’s evolution, while his nature should remain the same. Inconsistencies in the hero’s essence will feel like a betrayal to the audience. The more the hero changes, the more parts of them need to remain the same. Continue reading Characterization Lessons from Pop Culture (Updated)→
My least favorite type of writing has always been summarizing. Whether I was pitching a screenplay or a synopsis for a book, I got too concerned about what producers and publishers were looking for. I hated whatever I put on paper. It felt like I was cutting out the tastiest parts to make it palatable, misrepresenting the material by packaging it for mass appeal.
When my screenwriting professor videotaped the pitch for my first script, I ranted for twenty minutes. This was no elevator pitch. The lift for the tallest building in the world doesn’t take that long to get to the top. I had to lower my time to two minutes or less. Continue reading How to turn a Complex Story into a Simple Synopsis→
How do writers get their readers to identify with their characters?
One method is to make the character as basic as possible. This way the reader can fill them with their own details. Have you ever played a role playing game where you get to select your character’s class, hair, and armor? This is taking the default option: the bland blonde fair skinned male human, the rice cake of warrior classes. This option keeps the character so empty, the audience has no choice but to fill him with their own back story.
In 1895, Robert W. Chambers wrote a horror collection called The King in Yellow. Each entry was about a person who had the misfortune of reading a play called The King in Yellow, a play that had the power to drive each of them insane.
H.P. Lovecraft was so inspired by The King in Yellow that he fabricated his own tome of forbidden knowledge called the Necronomicon. The King in Yellow went on to inspire John Carpenter’s films In the Mouth of Madness and Cigarette Burns. Its influence can be felt in The Ring and most recently True Detective, which references the king, the yellow sign, and Carcosa by name.
While True Detective referenced Chambers’s symbolism, the show left his premise alone. I wanted to tell a detective story where the cursed text took center stage. Enjoy. Continue reading Grieving in Reverse: A Horror Noir→
Why writers should avoid cheap romantic shorthand and what they can replace it with
Valentine’s Day is almost here.
The one day a year couples are expected to make the time for one another, to rekindle the old flame, to make bold romantic gestures. So naturally I’m thinking about revenge thrillers.
Ever notice how women are portrayed in these vengeance fantasies? A widower flashes back to his lost Lenore dancing, haloed in sunlight, a ballerina spinning on top of a music box in his mind. She is the picture of innocence, riding the hypnotic bliss of her man’s presence. She rolls in the grass, laughs at nothing, and smiles for the sake of smiling. Continue reading Revenge Thriller Romance→
Why writers shouldn’t put up an APPLAUSE sign in the middle of their story
Writers, have you ever wondered if your story was too self involved? Ask yourself, is the hero so funny that he laughs at his own jokes? Is every walk on role just as witty? Is your dialogue so clever that it defies belief? Continue reading Humble Thy Story→
These images were inspired by Karin Dreijer Andersson’s makeup in the band Fever Ray’s music video for ‘If I Had A Heart.’
The Balance of Hope and Dread
Writing a compelling story is a balancing act between hope and dread.
When the hero staggers down the sidewalk with a pink slip in one hand and an eviction notice in the other, put a piece of dread on the scale. When the hero discovers an old cellphone, with a genie trapped inside, granting wishes through text messages, put a piece of hope on the scale. When the phone’s battery starts running out of juice, put a piece of dread on. Continue reading Too Much Dread→
When I buy a ticket to a franchise film I feel like I’m enabling a friend with a history of letting me down. It’s been a while since he’s violated my trust. Maybe it’s time to give him another chance. Maybe he’s running with a better crowd, producers and screenwriters who actually care about him. Maybe he found the help he needed. Continue reading Why I’m Worried about the Future of Franchise Films→
Method writers write what they know while classical writers draw entirely from their imaginations. I’m not here to tell you which style is best, I’m here to tell you how to walk the line between the two without staggering.
Take too much inspiration from the real world and your notebook turns into a black hole
Writers struggle to keep our memoirs out of our fiction, to keep our rage journals out of character narrations, to put some distance between our diaries and the worlds we’re building.
Our personal lives have a way of demanding roles in our stories. We’re lured into taking ideas from them with the promise of added realism. A smattering of truth can add authenticity to fantasy, but there’s a risk in mixing fiction and nonfiction. If a story is rooted too deeply in reality it resists changes it may ultimately need. The trick is to warp life events to serve your story, not to bend it to report those events more accurately.
I use a waiting period when it comes to drawing from trauma. Fresh wounds bleed into my imagination. When I have a falling out I have to fight the urge to pick up my pen. When I get dumped I have to resist the compulsion to bring the break up into my story. When I get downsized I have to resist setting the same pink slip on my hero’s desk.
When something bad happens, I usually have another story going. I don’t want to shoehorn my journal into events I already have in motion. I might feel a need to share a personal revelation, but if I put it into the wrong forum it will seem jarring.
That’s why I wait until my statute of limitations has passed. My immediate reactions are inarticulate. They come out too soon for me to settle on an allegory. My metaphors refuse to mix, like a sloppy cocktail, they leave a bad aftertaste in the readers’ mouths. If I feel something too intensely I overuse hyperbole. My poetic exaggerations color my prose in the deepest shade of purple. I get so abstract that when it comes time to edit, I fail to see what I meant.
Why Emotions Suck at Plotting Stories
If I invite emotional reactions into what I’m working on, they make themselves at home. They move things around. They demand that I convert my third person story into a first person one. My emotions don’t have time to show evidence to the audience, they want to talk directly to them. They insert monologues into scenes that would benefit from quiet tension. They’re too negative to let my characters go through positive changes.
When there’s a death in the family, sometimes it’s better to hold onto that grief before putting it on paper. Writers naturally develop fresh phrases to describe their emotions. It takes time for the right language to come. Wade into your stream of consciousness too soon and it will flood out onto page.
It’s only when I’m numb to tragedy that I can examine it with clarity. Time allows me to see which details add credibility to my story and which ones weigh it down. I want the audience to relate to my characters, but I don’t want to share too much information. Not because I run the risk of exposing myself, but because I run the risk of slowing my pacing.
My notebook swallowed the sun, enshrouding the world in eternal darkness
The Dangers of Casting Characters with Real Life Players
Real world personalities can add spice to your story, but don’t just cast your evil ex because you’re jilted. Do it because the story needed a character who was at once disloyal and prided themselves on their honesty. The “You’re so vain, I bet you think this book is about you defense” won’t hold up with your family and friends.
When drawing character traits from real life focus on behaviors more than physical features. Borrow tells, looks, strange habits and peculiar mannerisms.
Get the expression on your subject’s face right. Don’t bother giving us a composite. If you draw from subtleties, your coworkers might not recognize themselves. They’ll continue to give passive aggressive criticism of your performance, without realizing their smile is in stark contrast with their eyes.
If your boss sees themselves on the page, what are you going to say? If a friend sees themselves in your character lineup, do you want to deal with the fallout? Will you look forward to Christmas dinner after demonizing your mother?
If all your characters need to come from a real place, mix and match the parts. Make a Frankenstein monster, an unrecognizable amalgamation. If the character is complex enough, you won’t get sued for likeness rights.
Why You Shouldn’t Tell Anyone a Character is Based on Them
When you tell friends they have a part in your story, you’re less likely to take creative liberties. When they know a character is based on them you’re less inclined to make them do something embarrassing. Humiliation humanizes characters, but now you feel compelled to give them a cool composure. Their stand-in becomes a flawless forgery that’s no fun to read.
For characters to be relatable they need to be vulnerable. Dignity is a luxury. Before anyone can rise above a challenge, we need to see them at their lowest. Stories shouldn’t respect their character’s privacy. We need to talk about their unmentionables, sort through their dirty laundry, and autopsy the skeletons in their closets.
If you use a real person’s name throughout your first draft, only to ‘Find and Replace’ it later, you’re playing with fire. Even if you’ve burned all your bridges, your story is better off without them. If you base a character too closely on a real person, they might refuse to take your commands. The plot needs them to go one way, but you know their real life counterpart wouldn’t.
Being real and feeling real are not the same. Use some artistic license.
Another life swallowed up by my fiction.
Keep Your Imagination from Leaking
Just as writers don’t want their memoirs to invade their fiction, we want to keep our imagination from leaking into the rest of our brains.
Having experienced so many narratives, from Saturday morning cartoons to novels, our memories have adapted their story-telling mechanics. Remembering things in three act structures, we assign life events an artificial beginning, middle, and end, when in reality that’s not how they happened. Blending our recollections with our imaginations, can have consequences.
The brain uses the same process to evoke a memory as it does to visualize an idea. The mind’s eye plays its documentaries and found footage movies on the same screen. It’s only natural that we mistake one for the other, but just because we see signs of fate, doesn’t mean our lives follow story logic.
If we corrupt our memories to fit into narrative beats, we’ll see ourselves as heroes and ignore the things we need to change. If we spend our memories in our stories, we’ll run out of material quickly. We need to perfect our skills for fabrication, while keeping them isolated to our imagination.
Writer’s block isn’t always the result of a lack of inspiration. Sometimes it comes from a conflict in the mind. A little self examination can save a whole lot of time. Wordsmiths need to be aware of their own thinking, before finding the right balance between classical and method writing.
People don’t passively consume books, they participate in them. They cast themselves in the lead role, acquiring the hero’s goal, going through their evolution, learning all the same lessons. They feel the protagonist’s sense of urgency. They wait until it’s safe to set their bookmark in the page.
Authors need not write choose-your-own adventure novels to get their readers in on the action. When the author sets the scene, the reader chooses the angles. When the author determines the perspective, the reader adjusts the focus. When the author describes the environment, the reader provides the soundscape.
Writers should leave room for these contributions.
I disagree with any literary theory class that convinces students there’s only one way to interpret a story’s symbolism, that only the astute will walk away with the right understanding. I hate discussions that turn everyone’s translation into something uniform, that homogenize the imagination, that turn text into fixed images.
A line of description is worth a thousand pictures. We all see stories differently.
My reading of H.P. Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness is going to differ heavily from yours. My mind’s art department added some after market modifications to the giant penguins, making them more disturbing. Since those blind birds were livestock for something in the shadows, I decided to see them with their eyes seared shut, wings clipped, and ankles fused together in crystalline slime, their feathers dripping with oil and blood. Lovecraft drew up the creature designs, but it’s my inner Industrial Light and Magic team that assembled them.
At the Mountains of Madness
What Reading and Filmmaking have in Common
Film is a collaborative medium. Screenplays are maps, they are not the terrain. There are discoveries to be made by every artist walking down the screenwriter’s path. The screenwriter might have the hero catch the villain’s punch and twist his arm, but the fight choreographer might think it’d look cooler if the villain flipped himself free.
This is why screenwriters are told not to use camera directions like:
PAN TO SILHOUETTE
ZOOM IN ON KNIFE
or EXTREME CLOSEUP – EYES FULL OF PANIC
These lines do the cinematographer’s job for them. Specifics limit the director of photography’s artistic contribution, taking the discovery of the shots away from them.
Screenwriters shouldn’t do the actor’s jobs for them either. Using a parenthetical, a writer could specify the tone of every line, but they shouldn’t. The situation should dictate the delivery. It’s up to the actor and the director to suss out the emotions themselves. Good dialogue leaves room for spontaneity, for the little gems actors give in the spur of the moment.
In the same sense that screenwriters shouldn’t direct from the page, authors shouldn’t do the readers’ job for them. Like film, fiction writing is a collaborative medium.
Fahrenheit 451
How to Leave Room for Your Reader’s Imagination
As writers, it’s our job to illuminate just enough of our environments to let the reader play set designer, matte artist, and lighting department. We layout just enough of our characters’ costumes to leave the reader in charge of tailoring. We identify sounds, but we don’t mark every noise with an onomatopoeia. That’s where the reader gets to play foley artist. We evoke the sound effect, they pull it up from their memory archives. Who are we to debate with readers, when they turn our “muffled thuds” into thunderous crashes in their heads?
When it comes to writing supernatural stories, it’s often best to leave room for abstraction, to describe something seen out of the corner of your hero’s eye, to describe a silhouette, teasing the reader with the details in the dark.
Read Neil Gaiman’s The Ocean at the End of the Lane for a masterclass in supernatural writing. Gaiman doesn’t describe the creatures in this novel down to their molecular level, instead he gives you an impression. Sometimes they’re shadows that disappear the moment the narrator focuses on them. Sometimes they’re so horrifying that the narrator’s memory wipes their image the moment he looks away.
Gaiman gives you an idea of the creatures and asks your imagination to do the heavy lifting. One of my favorite descriptions was something along the lines of, “These ancient creatures weren’t dinosaurs, but rather the buzzards that fed on dinosaurs.”
He leaves just enough of a Madlib for his readers to fill in.
One of my favorite tricks in Gaiman’s tool box is when he has the narrator question his recollection. The narrator wonders how he could’ve ever mistaken his nether-realm nannie’s face for anything but a pile of strategically placed rags, until the light shifted and she was beautiful again. Those fluid descriptions had my mind staging grand productions.
Upon finishing Gaiman’s book, I adored the movie the two of us made in my head. I know The Ocean at the End of the Lane has already been optioned for the big screen, but I suspect I’ll prefer my adaptation to the theatrical one.
When people say, “The book was better than the movie” what they’re really saying is, “My interpretation of the book was more vivid, more involving, and more layered than the movie had time to be.”
They’re not arguing the worth of one medium over another, that’s like comparing apples to oranges, they’re arguing the value of imagination over tangible representation. They’re arguing for their version. This is why I’m not afraid of a scenario like the one found in Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, where books fall so far out of fashion that they’re burned. Too many readers care about their own artistic contributions to let that happen.
Films have the power to invoke the imagination, the best leave spaces for their audiences to wander in, but books are always wide open, waiting for your input, your vision, and your additions.
Stephen King says, “Writing is telepathy.” I’d say the best of these messages evolve upon delivery.
All artistic mediums invite participation from their observer, but few offer as much creative freedom as literature.
