Monthly Archives: October 2014

Story Tempo and the Average Writer

Posted by natechen on

Let me start by saying that when I talk about the average writer, I mean me. This is as much about my experience with trying to find the tempo of stories as it is anything, hopefully you’ll be able to glean some useful thoughts from my experience.

The tempo of a story is basically supposed to consist of a series of highs and lows that build steadily upwards and culminate in a climax shortly before the end, followed by a brief conclusion letting the reader decompress and process what happened during the story. I’ve talked some about this idea in my beat outline post and I don’t plan to rehash it much here.

Now this is no great revelation to most people. Standard story structure has been around pretty much forever, we see it in stories like The Odyssey and many of the other classical stories. But, as we so often find, the key to this is not in the concept but in the execution. You can structure the tempo of your stories perfectly but that’s just the beginning. Everything has a tempo.

If you’ve ever practiced music in the Western tradition you’re familiar with how beats can be subdivided. Each measure has a number of beats in it, each beat can be broken down into smaller and smaller notes, they all have a different notations and a huge chunk of musical theory revolves around the ways they compare and contrast. Oddly enough, writing has no such system for analyzing beats, even though tempo is horribly important to building a good story or even writing an interesting factual report. It’s true writing is more art than science, but so is music and it has a well regulated system for analyzing tempo so why not writing?

It is impossible to formulate a way to alleviate this problem quickly or without a widespread recognition of the problem on the part of the writing community. So for right now, I’m just going to make the case for why I think such a thing should exist.

Take a short story. It could be any short story but I’m going to use Emergency Surface, which you can read for yourself by clicking that link, as an example. There will be spoilers here, so you’ve been warned. The pacing of the story is thus:

  • In Emergency Surface, the story begins with the problem being introduced – a submarine, Erin’s Dream by name, is taking on water.
  •  Complications arise when the leaking compartment can’t be completely sealed and two compartments flood as a result. But they are sealed off in the end.
  • Unfortunately, those two flooded compartments are the largest on the sub and are putting huge stress on the ship. It will break up if they can’t be pumped out.
  • Taking the ship to the surface is a viable way to repair the hull, since the pressure there will be much less and allow the crew to work on the pressure hull safely and they run no risk of being crushed.
  • Erin’s Dream is crewed by a group of people who want to avoid being seen by the people who live on the surface. Not only does the crew not want to go there it could actually get them into trouble, not just with the surface people but their own people as well.
  • Duffy, the sub’s captain, decides to run the risk of discovery and sends the ship to the surface.
  • The amount of water in the hull is starting to become a real problem – the center of the ship is much less buoyant than the ends and the ship may snap in half before it can surface.
  • Herrigan, the sub’s salvage commander, leads a detachment of minisubs out to brace the center of the Erin’s Dream and try and relieve stress on the hull.
  • One of the minisub pilots panics from agoraphobia as he finds himself in the middle of the dark ocean with no fixed points of reference. He breaks away and sends his vehicle back towards the ocean floor.
  • At the climax of the story, Herrigan decides to break away from the Erin’s Dream as well in an attempt to rescue his wayward pilot while Erin’s Dream proceeds to the surface with what they can only hope is enough support to keep the sub from being destroyed in the process.
  • The problem is resolved when we find Oscar assessing the repairs needed with his crew – so far undiscovered on the surface of the ocean. Herrigan returns with his wayward pilot and the crew is reunited.
  • A short conversation about the dangers of salvage sub operations followed by a decision to visit Australia and see what the surface world has been up to provides a denouement and lets us know that the crew is, on the whole, back on top of the situation and planning for the future.

So there it is. Looks like a typical story pacing, right? There’s a problem, solutions that create problems of their own, a climax when the outcome for everyone is in doubt, a resolution and a brief unwinding period. Nothing groundbreaking here.

But if you compare it to the average “chapter” post I’ve been making as I hammer out novels, if you outline them by beats and events, they don’t match this pacing at all.

So the question that I feel writers need to analyze more deeply is, does every scene need a similar pacing to a short story? Should each beat of your beat outline itself match the pacing of a good story, with challenges, solutions, a climax and a resolution? It’s not impossible – short stories find that pacing in as many words all the time.

Should there be different kinds of pacing for scenes? How many? What should we call them to make discussion easier? Musical notes are infinitely divisible, how much can we dissect storytelling and still find the rules of pacing and tempo unchanged? How did one question for discussion turn into so many so quickly? I really don’t know.

This is an issue that I have no clear cut idea on yet, I’ve been struggling with it in my own writing of late.  It’s entirely possible that this whole concept has been hashed out before and I’ve just never heard of it, so I would love to hear of any resources you’ve found on the subject of tempo and pacing and how it might be broken down in the writing of stories. This is also a topic we’ll probably revisit in the future, so I hope you’ll look forward to it.

Cool Things: Scorpion

Posted by natechen on

It’s not often that I talk about TV shows on this blog, much less ones that are still in the airing. Scorpion only has a couple episodes under it’s belt so far and that makes talking about it meaningfully even more difficult. I still think it’s still worth your consideration.

The premise is that the Federal Government is building a special unit to deal with unique, highly sophisticated technological crimes. So far, so good. There’s been a lot of programs with that premise in the past, we live in an age of evolving information technology with an ever-greater impact on our lives and people are still grappling with the implications that has on their safety and security.

The thing about Scorpion is that it’s as much a comedy as it is a thriller. You see, four of the five main characters are certifiable geniuses with attendant impediments to proper social functioning. From the moment we see Walter O’Brien breaking up with his girlfriend and, in the process presenting her with a flowchart that will help her work through the emotions that she’ll be dealing with, we know that the people we’re about to meet are not normal.

Scorpion is a goofy mashup of 24 and The Big Bang Theory, chalk full of looming disasters, technobabble and humorous social awkwardness. But where 24 is all about the suspense and The Big Bang Theory celebrates geekiness with the nudge-nudge-wink-wink glee of an insider, Scorpion is more about how the brilliance of some minds leaves them isolated.

The heart and soul of Scorpion is less Walter and his quartet of geniuses. It’s not even Paige, their girl Friday, who is the social buffer they need to interact well with “normal” society. At least as far as I’ve seen, as of this writing, the heart of the show is Ralph, Paige’s son.

Walter first meets Ralph at the diner just after he breaks up with his girlfriend. Ralph has been suspended from school – and not for the first time from the sound of things – and has gone with his single mother to work. Walter sees him pushing objects around on the diner’s counter in a seemingly random fashion and he watches for a moment. Then he steps over and starts pushing salt shakers and creamer packets himself. After a few seconds Paige interrupts and Walter leaves, but not before telling her she needs to help her son. Walter could see what she missed.

Ralph was playing chess.

Paige thinks her son is slower than normal kids, handicapped in some way. On their next meeting, Walter is forced to tell her, “I’m sorry, but you’re son’s a genius.”

In our society we tend to think of people who are better than us at something as privileged and special. Scorpion is a TV show about how they’re also awkward and difficult. That doesn’t mean we can’t connect with them, but it’s going to take a lot of effort. Walter and his team are a larger than life portrait of why that’s worthwhile – thanks to a Homeland Security agent that realizes their potential they’re out to save the US one problem at a time.

But Ralph embodies Scorpion’s real message. Paige tells Walter her nail polish is streaky because Ralph likes to paint and he puts it on every morning. “He doesn’t like to paint,” Walter tells her. “He wants to hold your hand, but doesn’t know how to process physical contact.”

Even “mentally enabled” people like Ralph and Walter face a host of challenges just making it through the day. They need love, support and understanding just as much as the next person. Unfortunately, in today’s society there’s a tendency to say, “Oh, they’re smart, they can handle it” and leaving it at that. Scorpion makes a convincing case for the smart people we know very much needing the understanding and help of people who’s strengths lie in other areas.

Scorpion is still a new show, the cast isn’t entirely comfortable in their roles yet and there’s no telling if the writing will continue to be as strong and effectively character driven as the first couple of episodes, which are all I’ve seen as of this writing. But it promises to deal with a rarely addressed topic in an insightful, meaningful and entertaining way. And that makes it more than worthy of your attention.

Thunder Clap: Moving Fast

Posted by natechen on

Izzy

“This is a portable GPS navigation device.” Lincoln held up a black plastic rectangle about the size of an e-reader like he was a sleazy salesman, running one hand along the bottom for dramatic effect.

“Those aren’t exactly new tech,” I said dryly. “Dad got mom one because she kept getting lost running errands.”

“Yeah, but it’s special because it’s got maps loaded on it and doesn’t need Internet access. We’re starting to run out of phones with navigation programs that use preloaded maps. We borrowed it from the roadies of one of the opening acts and they’re probably going to want it back so try and keep it away from EMPs.” He tapped a few icons with the stylus and zoomed in on a specific intersection. The end destination the GPS was pointed towards was on the northeast corner. “This is where we need to go.”

“What makes you sure?” Jane asked, looking at him rather than the maps or floor plan. “It’s a bookstore, not an electronics store or something like that.”

“Three factors. To make an EMP you either need a fairly big device consisting of an antenna and a capacitor bank or a nuclear weapon. We’re assuming Circuit went with option one, since there haven’t been any massive explosions in the city tonight. ” Lincoln held his hands a few feet apart and sketched out a box about that tall and deep but twice as long. “You could probably make an EMP with a six, maybe eight block range about so big. EMPs get exponentially weaker as you go out from the source, just like magnetic fields, so it would be more effective to have a lot of small units than one large one and allow for more precise targeting when you deployed them. But most importantly, an EMP weapon of that size could easily be hidden in the utility room of the average two-story storefront.”

“But it would have to be a building of about that size,” Clark added, picking up the line of thought. “Smaller buildings don’t usually have a connection to the power grid robust enough to recharge that kind of weapon quickly.”

“Depending on what part of town you’re in that still leaves a lot of places that could house one of these things,” I pointed out.

“But if you narrow them down by sites Keller Realty has worked on the list shortens to one location.” Clark took the stylus from Al and tapped the GPS screen a few times, leaving us looking at a zoomed out map of the neighborhood. Other than the place they’d shown us before only one other red destination dot showed on the screen. He pointed at it and said, “This is the next closest place that fits both criteria of size and Keller Realty involvement but it’s outside the six to eight block radius range of effect for the weapon we’re assuming Circuit’s using.”

Cheryl leaned back and folded her arms over her stomach, chewing her lower lip thoughtfully. “How certain are we the Keller Realty line of inquiry isn’t another false lead? We did pick up on it from files left behind, in a very conspicuous fashion, at a site Circuit had already abandoned.”

“Believe me,” Clark said, rubbing at his temple, “we had that argument more than once in the last sixteen months. What it boils down to is, these are the leads we’ve got. And the message Helix got from Circuit earlier seems to have come from Waltham Towers, which is a connection back to Keller Realty.”

“Half of cracking a case is running down all the leads,” Teresa said. “We’d be negligent if we didn’t check this out. The question is, who goes and who stays?”

“I’ll lead the team,” Al said. “Clark comes because he’s a field analyst and we keep them handy in the field for good reason. Jane and Izzy, I’d like you two to come as well. That will give us plenty of firepower if we need to tangle with thugs again, or if Circuit has some sort of guards on this place. Teresa, you’ll be in charge here and watch for Circuit causing trouble and let Helix know what we’re up to if he gets back before we do.”

Teresa grimaced, clearly not happy with being benched but apparently seeing the sense in it. “If you’re not back in ninety minutes we’ll start thinking about coming in after you.”

“Fair.” All glanced around the circle. “Anyone spot any problems in the plan?”

“I should go with you instead of Jane.”

I looked at Amp in surprise. “I thought you said you couldn’t hear as well in the city. How does your being there help?”

She gave me a scalding look. “Because even if I can’t hear I can still make noise. Shouting people into ruptured eardrums is pretty effective and I can do it from farther away than you three can punch them into submission. More importantly, I can hear security cameras running from across a street, and if Circuit can control all the electricity in a city you bet he’s found some way to keep the security measures on the buildings he’s hidden weapons in running.”

Al grunted. “Fair enough. You’ll come with us, Jane and Gearshift will back up Cheryl and Teresa here. Teresa is in charge until Helix or I get back.”

“What about me?” Lincoln asked.

Al shrugged. “You’re free to go home or stay here, since you’re not technically with the Project in an official capacity. But if you, Cheryl and Teresa could put your heads together and come up with somewhere we can move our base of operations to once this is done it would be a big help.”

Lincoln turned thoughtful. “There’s a few possibilities. I might even know of somewhere with a backup generator. Leave us the GPS and I’ll get back to you.”

Al handed him the device and said, “All yours. Let’s go, people.”

——–

Helix

Grandpa used to tell me that the only one who hated piggy back rides more than he did was whoever he was giving one to. After crossing the city on Samson’s back all was clear.

We crashed down on the helicopter pad after about half an hour of jumping from rooftop to rooftop. Samson insisted that the whole heroes run on rooftops was a legitimate thing since anyone who could move at thirty miles an hour on foot didn’t have the reflexes to avoid pedestrians at street level but still wouldn’t go fast enough to avoid vehicle traffic. I took his word for it, mainly because when he tried to explain it to me he slowed down and I wanted to get off his back as soon as possible.

As I was shaking my legs out and hoping desperately to get them bending in the right ways again Jack and a team of guards pour out onto the roof of the building. In unison Jack and I said, “What are you doing here?”

Jack glanced at Samson, looked at the way I was standing, and shook his head. “Never mind. I think I figured it out. You need to clear the pad, chopper’s coming in.”

In point of fact that should have been immediately obvious since the sound of the approaching helicopter could already be heard approaching. Samson and I hustled off of the pad and over towards the door to the stairway. There was a short wait as the chopper came down over the building, maneuvered into position and lowered itself down.

I was tempted to ask Jack who it was who felt he needed to show up in a helicopter, rather than flying in to the airport and taking a car but I felt I had a pretty good idea. And, given the problems we’d run into on our way here, I thought I had an idea why taking a car might not have been a viable option.

Samson’s mind was apparently running along the same lines as mine. As the chopper settled to a rest and the blades began to slow he asked, “Have you or any of the emergency responders in the city tried sending units into the parts of the city without power?”

“First vehicles went out from police dispatch almost three hours ago, maybe ten minutes after the power went out. They stalled out two blocks outside the effected area.” Jack shrugged helplessly. “The police have a few units on bicycles in there, there’s a hospital with a working backup generator and landlines that’s in touch with it’s opposites out here and they tell us ambulances are still running, at least so long as they don’t try to cross from a part of the city with power to one without, or vice versa. But that’s about all that’s in there right now. Sanders is trying to assemble a team that can get into the city on foot but he’s operating on the assumption this is Circuit’s handywork and that he wouldn’t leave any holes in his defenses we could sneak a vehicle in through.”

While it was the obvious conclusion to reach, I was worried that everyone I knew seemed to have automatically assumed Circuit was behind the attack. It sure was his style but instantly focusing on him could blind us to other possibilities that might open useful lines of thought, even if our terrorist was Circuit and not someone using his name as a smokescreen.

Still. “That was a good thought,” I said. “Someone claiming to be Circuit did contact me while we were in the effected part of the city. Says he’s taking over, stay out of his way, you get the picture. But something about all this bugs me. I just can’t put my finger on it.”

“Well hold on to that thought,” Jack said. “There’s a meeting in about ten minutes for all senior personnel.”

“Go-go Project Sumter,” I muttered. “Meetings are our idea of action.”

Jack grinned. “Let me know how that goes.”

“What, you’re not going to be there?” He started to make a comeback and hesitated for just a second. Jack had recently been moved up to field agent training supervisor, a senior position, which he had no doubt just remembered.

“Remind me why I wanted to be a senior manager again?”

“Don’t look at me, I don’t worry about that kind of thing anymore.” A short, rotund figure was climbing out of the helicopter onto the landing pad. “Although I have a feeling Senator Voorman has a better idea about regretting career changes than us.”

As his old field supervisor and security escort made their way off the landing pad Samson rushed forward and wrapped him in a giant hug. Jack watched the greeting then shook his head. “How are those two friends? Makes no sense to me. Voorman’s never been anything but administrator – a good, sure, but still. He only got elected because you and Samson got behind him and pushed. Office pool gives him twelve to one odds of surviving reelection.”

“He’s full of surprises,” I said. “Didn’t expect to see him here, that’s for sure.”

“Wonder why he’s here.”

I turned and started for the stairs. “We’ll find out at the meeting. Gonna try and get the rundown from Sanders before we start – and there’s someone we need to bring in on this case pronto.”

“Who’s that?” Jack asked.

“Mister Roger Keller.”

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Writing Men: Daniel Ocean

Posted by natechen on

This segment has talked a lot about the components of writing men but it hasn’t really analyzed a male character and broken down the elements that make them work, what makes them distinctly masculine and well written without falling into the traps that tend to characterize the gender wars. Since the point of this segment is examining what goes into writing a realistic male character, that’s kind of an oversight and it’s one that’s about to be remedied. But before we do that, if you haven’t watched the 2001 version of Ocean’s Eleven you might want to do that.

Today we’re going to discuss the character Daniel Ocean and how he embodies the male thought patterns and behaviors that we’ve discussed so far (and one we haven’t but we’ll get to soon.) I’m not going in the order I’ve discussed them in but rather the order we see them in the film.

To start with, we see Daniel Ocean alone.

Yes, I know that he’s technically in front of a parole board but all we see is him, sitting in that chair and he’s talking about the things he thought about while he was essentially isolated from all his connections and usual lifestyle in jail. With Danny leading a team of eleven, plus the villains and miscellaneous other characters, there’s just no time to leave him alone at any other point in the story so this is our glimpse into his inner workings and how he feels he’s been inadequate in the past. He explains what he did to go to jail and he explains what went wrong. And in those few moments we get a pretty good idea of what the movie is going to be about, although we don’t really know it at the time. In other words, we get solitude refining Daniel’s understanding of his own objectives and, in the process, passing that understanding to us.

But like all good foreshadowing, we don’t see it at the time.

Once out of jail Danny moves on to find Rusty, his right hand man, and confronts him over a game of poker. Here we get our axiom for the movie in an interesting kind of reversal delivery. Rusty is in the middle of teaching a bunch of Hollywood actors to play poker when Danny arrives. The undercurrent here is that Rusty doesn’t want Danny pulling him back into the conman-thief lifestyle that they clearly enjoyed previously. What’s going on?

We get a clue when Rusty asks his poker players what the first rule of the game is. The answer: “Don’t bring personal feelings to the table.”

Then Rusty proceeds to misread Danny’s hand entirely and looses the pot. The lesson for the audience? Personal feelings are on the table. In fact, this whole thing is personal. That’s the axiom Daniel will live by and is living by. Sure, the job they’re about to pull is going to make everyone a lot of money but that’s not what Daniel Ocean is interested in. It’s really just there to convince all the people he needs in his camp to go along with him.

Next we see Danny and Rusty recruiting their team. As the film title suggests they wind up with nine other people but we’re only really interested in the last one of these for the purposes of examining Daniel Ocean, the man. That character is Linus Caldwell and he’s a pickpocket. When we first see him, Danny comes up and picks his pocket – right after Linus has just picked the pocket of a wealthy Wall Street business man.

This brief moment of competition establishes Danny as more skilled than Linus and sets up Danny for another classic masculine behavior – mentorship. This is the part we haven’t talked about much so I’m going to leave it sit for the moment, but only after I point out that this relationship works in part because Danny establishes his credibility in such an obviously male fashion – by proving he can one up Linus. That makes him the logical mentor for Linus and gives him the figurative muscle he needs to push Linus into growing his skills in ways he otherwise might not have.

Linus also introduces us to Danny’s true objective, as Linus is the character to introduce Tess, Danny’s wife. Tess wasn’t aware of her husband’s scheming, thieving lifestyle when they got married and when Danny was inevitably found out she left him. Now she works with, and is romantically involved with, the owner of a Las Vegas casino – the casino that Danny and his crew plan to rob. For the crew, it’s about stealing money. For Danny it’s about stealing his wife back. The objective isn’t business, it’s personal.

Which brings us to the one aspect of writing men we haven’t discussed yet: Sacrifice.

The whole movie is about what Danny is willing to sacrifice for Tess. Terry Benedict, the man they’re robbing, is ruthless and heartless but he hides that from Tess. If he ever finds out Danny was the man who robbed him, Benedict will have no problems finding them and having them killed – financially or morally. Danny is risking his life in a last chance bid to warn his wife of the kind of man she’s turned to and beg her to come back to him. At first glance it looks like desperation. On some level it is.

But deep down, it’s courage. Tess has become Danny’s highest priority and he just can’t find it in him to put anything else higher. Not the rules of his old profession. Not the risk of loosing the esteem of the people he’s worked with or of loosing his parole and going back to jail. Not even the fear of death at the hands of Terry Benedict.

In his own way, Daniel Ocean is a man on fire, just like any action movie hero. And in his portrayal we see the defining elements of writing good male characters.

Cool Things: Balance and Ruin

Posted by natechen on

Video games are considered a lot of things these days but an art form is rarely one of them. That’s too bad, since there are several aspects of them that require very careful craftsmanship to be done right and it’s the mastery of craft under difficult conditions to communicate our thoughts that creates great art. One of the aspects of video games that’s seen the most forceful realization of this principle is the creation of music for them.

In the early days, when Nintendo was making the first installments of it’s well known Mario and Zelda franchises the technology available could only really create a single tone at a time. To create music that would really inspire the sense of adventure and fun that went with those early games the composers probably spent days writing simple, powerful melodies one note at a time that would go on to define a generation. Don’t believe me? Listen to the theme from Mario 1-1.

Now find a person between the age of fifteen and forty. Whistle the first three notes of that tune and at least two thirds of those people will not only join you by the third note but go on to complete the entire tune. The music was that strong, that memorable, that good.

Now Mario is a cultural touchstone, his face is almost synonymous with video games and it’s no surprise that his tunes would be well known, too. There are plenty of other examples of video game music as art, rather than just part of commercialized escapism. The influence just isn’t as widely felt.

One of the key things that sets great art apart is that it inspires. By this standard some people might argue that video game music falls short. They will suggest that the music behind a mindless diversion can’t possibly serve to inspire others to create. To these people I offer one small glimpse of just how far down the rabbit hole goes.

The name is Balance and Ruin.

It’s a seventy four track album of music assembled by the OverClocked Remix community and inspired by Final Fantasy Six.

OC Remix is a community devoted to exploring video game music as an art form and most of their work are remixes, reimaginings of old music through new technology or stylistic choices. Several people in the OC Remix community have gone on to work as professional musicians. Their tributes to game music is more than derivative – in fact, a panel of community judges must approve each piece of music not only for artistic and musical quality but originality – and it shows a creativity that is always impressive and sometimes breathtaking.

It’s very, very hard to adequately describe music with text and explaining how all those tunes fit in to the massive, multilayered story that makes up FF6 is way beyond the scope of a single post. So I’ve decided to let the music speak for itself, since the OC Remix community has made their work available for free. I’ve picked three tracks from Balance and Ruin that show how the music has really inspired the creation of solid art.

First, Ascension of a Madman, based on the anthem of the game’s villain.

You can just feel the insanity bursting out, right? Here’s something a little more upbeat to help settle down those brainwaves. Don’t ask why it’s called Train Suplex. It would take too long to explain.

So those two tracks are peppy and fairly fast paced. But one of the most famous, most artistic moments in FF6 is the opera sequence. You understand what I mean if you’ve played it and if you haven’t, well, my explaining it won’t help you. So I’ll let Jillian Aversa try it for me. Seriously, if you can listen to this and not hear art you have no soul and should spend more time getting that fixed and less time talking about what is or is not art.

If you’re interested in finding and listening to the whole album the OC Remix community page for it is here: http://ocremix.org/album/46/final-fantasy-vi-balance-and-ruin