Tag Archives: On Writing

Introductions Are in Order

Posted by natechen on

Do you remember the first time you saw Captain Jack Sparrow? Of course you do. It looked just like this:

Before this you knew nothing about Jack. He’s not foreshadowed at any point in the film until this moment. But within a few seconds you understand the basics. He’s a pirate, he’s a little out of it and he possesses incredible poise and chutzpah. Just look at the way he steps off that crow’s nest and onto the docks. Odds are that’s exactly the first thing you think about when you think about Jack Sparrow.

And that is the power of the introduction.

Or, as you’ve probably heard ad nauseum, first impressions matter. How your audience meets your characters is a vital part of how their experience with your story will be shaped. A good introduction needs to tell, in a nutshell, who your character is, set the tone he brings to the story and signal his importance to what is going on.

So go back and watch that introduction again. What does it tell you about Jack?

Well, he may be a pirate but he has a solid, even handed understanding of what that lifestyle implies. He even has a kind of respect for those who have lived it to the natural conclusion. And he tends to be a big picture kind of guy – looks up and out instead of down and around, or he might have noticed his boat was flooding sooner. Oh, and the man has swagger. No getting around that. It’s a testimony to Johnny Depp’s skills at characterization that he lets us know all this without saying anything at all.

There, in sixty seconds of cinema, is a character in a nutshell. Purpose, a way of thinking with attendant weaknesses, defining personality trait. Don’t brush off all the thought that went into setting all that up – I’m not reading too much into things. This kind of characterization is the best of the best and ever aspect of it is planned like a villain orchestrating global takeover. You or I might never reach this level of skill, because it’s very hard and requires both talent and dedication to reach, but the first step is acknowledging it exists.

So find the very essence of your character and try and show it in just a paragraph or two and you’ll be on your way to a good start. Usually it’s best to show the character in his natural environment, as we see with Jack, but sometimes showing them out of their element is more effective. Really, the particulars of where and when we first meet a character should be chosen to best cast the character in the audience’s mind. More on this later.

The second thing you want from an introduction is tone. Jack Sparrow is the soul of Pirates of the Caribbean. His light hearted, irreverent and cocky attitude permeates the movie and, no matter what the mood is before he appears, as soon as we see him swaying his way onto the screen we find ourselves smiling. In part because this was the man who stepped directly from sinking ship to dockside without even a backwards glance.

Every character, even your main character, brings a certain tone to the scenes they are in, whether it be tension, fun, unease or calm. Now central characters are certainly multidimensional but even they manage to hit all the notes they need to in a tone that is unique to them. The tone you set in their introduction is the tone your audience will expect.

Finally, introduce your character in a way that fits their importance to the story. Not every character needs a huge introduction that hints at the strengths, weaknesses and hidden depths of the character. If you plan to expand them in a later story that’s fine – do it then. Sure, keep their introduction and all the rest of their screen time in step with your plans for the future but don’t turn a side character into a red herring.

Interestingly enough, Jack Sparrow is an example of what can happen if you aren’t careful with a character’s introduction and development. He wasn’t originally planned as a leading character but as a supporting character to Will and Elizabeth. Depp took the role with both hands and ran with it, resulting in the movie we have. That may not have been a bad thing but the point remains – Jack became a central character because he demanded it. If you have someone who shows up demanding a bigger role and you don’t give it to him change the way he shows up or your audience will be very confused.

Making your characters real in the minds of your audience is a very difficult task and it begins when a new character is introduced. So give them the best introduction you can.

——–

Now for an announcement! The first of my summer vacations starts this weekend. This is the longer of the two and I won’t have any time for writing this week so I’m not going to post anything either. Sorry.

But I’ll be back on July 7th with a new set of stories and a month-long feature on Wednesdays to boot! It’ll be worth it to come and check it out. See you then.

Investment Levels

Posted by natechen on

A man and his wife are sitting in their living room, on a sofa in front of the coffee table. An argument commences in the way most arguments start – with little warning about something that’s probably not important. After a few minutes the man stands up a bit too fast and bangs his shins on the coffee table. Cursing, he limps into the kitchen and pours himself a glass of wine as his wife straightens the coffee table out and gets it back in its proper place. The two are yelling at each other all the while. The man walks back into the living room, sipping his wine, the cupboard door standing open behind him.

The woman gets up and stalks past him, closing the cupboard door, while he turns his back and walks to the window, shaking his head in frustration. There’s a moment of silence as she checks the kitchen for messes and he stares out the window. They meet back at the sofa for round two. As things ramp back up again he moves to slam his glass down on the coffee table, she grabs his hand before it gets half way and gently takes the wine from him.

Aggravated, he lays in harder, gesturing wildly. She grows still, quietly answering each point until finally he traps her and triumphantly calls her out on a stupid discrepancy. She fumes for a moment, then flings the glass on the floor and storms out, leaving her surprised husband with wine and glass all over the floor, the sofa and his pants.

This is part two of a two part set. Part one is here. We’re talking about action scenes, what they look like and how to do them. What you see above is the outline of an action scene. No, it’s not a traditional action scene with chases, explosions or fisticuffs, but it’s still an action scene. It’s not that long, although with dialog it might be longer than you think, but then action scenes don’t need to be long, just engaging.

The most important thing here, at least in my opinion, is the viewpoint. It’s a third person story and that’s part of what makes it work. While we could spend all our time in the heads of one of these characters the way they’re arguing would steal much of the action – it’s the point/counterpoint of their actions, leading up to the twist when the orderly woman finally looses it and makes a mess, that gives the action drive, purpose and timing. Change the point of view to first person with either character and you get a very different scene, and one that would probably be much harder to play with the same sense of immediacy and drive that being a fly on the wall would give you.

We often think of first person as the most immediate and engaging point of view. This is not always the case, however. If you look at the scene that opens this post from the first person point of view you find that it looses a lot of the action. The characters aren’t looking at each other during most of the action and their thoughts about their circumstances and how the other person is acting are going to slow down the pacing.

The climax of this scene is where the woman, who has been obsessively keeping the room meat, finally breaks down and makes a mess. There’s wonderful symbolism about the state of their relationship tied up in that moment. But it’s not going to come through unless we’ve seen the full interplay between both characters, and for that we need a detached third perspective.

Have you ever been to one of those movies that uses a constantly jostling, tumbling camera perspective to try and create the feeling that you’re right there, in the action? Ever notice how it’s mostly just nauseating and makes the action harder to follow? Writing action from the wrong perspective can be like that. Not to say action from the first person is impossible – it can and has been done. But like with all writing choices you have to keep your audience and the ultimate goal of your writing in mind.

First person gives us an investment in the person telling the story, but third person transfers the emphasis to what is going on – and that’s the heart of the action sequence. Even some first person stories find ways to tell action from the third person point of view, that way the audience is invested in what is going on and how it will affect the characters they care about, not what the characters are thinking or feeling. There’s often very little time for either in the heart of unfolding events, so it’s better to unpack that later anyways.

It’s much better to show than tell, so some books with well written action scenes that I would recommend include The Horse And His Boy by C. S. Lewis (pay particular attention to the battle scene at the end), Madhouse by Rob Thurman (the Sawney Bean fights), Moon Over SoHo by Ben Aaronovitch (chasing the Pale Lady and Peter’s first meeting with the Faceless Man) and any of the Cobra books by Timothy Zahn for gravity defying parkour at its best. Can you think of any I’ve missed? Be sure to let me know!

And Action!

Posted by natechen on

At least half of all writing calls for an action sequence of some kind. We’re not just talking about a knock-down-drag-out slug fest here, anything from two kids chasing each other through the house to a particularly heated argument with fists banged on table tops and people pacing back and forth are opportunities for “action” sequences. With the right kind of writing a cross country race is not just a slog across back roads, it’s a gripping series of events that keeps the reader invested in what is happening to your characters.

If you’ve been to the movies on a regular basis in the last few years odds are you’ve seen a lot of action sequences so you already know that they have a lot of parts to them and can be done a lot of different ways. The construction of an action sequence is a big enough of a topic that I want to take two weeks to break it down, so this week we’re going to start with what an action sequence needs.

Action sequences all need a few basic building blocks:

  1. A character or thing that is taking action. You can’t have an action sequence based on a bunch of rocks baking in the summer sun. Ideally there will be a relatable character at the center of an action sequence, particularly if it’s early in the story, but compelling action sequences can also be built around an object or objects, like a coin being weighed and tossed about by the mechanisms inside a ridiculously complex vending machine. Or even better, a Rube Goldberg sequence that starts with that coin and ends with a bag of salted peanuts. While this sounds like a visual thing don’t underestimate how much a sequence of odd cause and effect events can interest readers, as well.
  2. A goal of some sort that everything will eventually lead to. Even if the whole point of the slip of paper making it’s way through 39 steps from the secretary who takes the message to it’s recipient is to introduce Luther Pendleton, Clockworker Supreme, when he picks it up out of his inbox, make sure all this action gets the readers somewhere. Action with no point comes across as frantic and quickly gets annoying.
  3. Things for the character (or thing) to react to. This usually comes in the form of an obstacle but can involve the character finding something unexpected and helpful, like a skateboard to use in the middle of a chase sequence. Remember, walking is an action. It doesn’t really become interesting until someone slips on a banana peel. Without something to react to, there’s no action.
  4. A sense of place. Where action takes place is as much a part of the action as what is going on. If you have any doubts about this I refer you to the clock tower sequence of The Great Mouse Detective. Your place doesn’t have to be quite thaaaat dramatic, but obviously you need something.
  5. A sense of timing. Just as with humor, in the action sequence timing is everything. You can’t just go from zero to hero in a couple of paragraphs or a few seconds of camerawork. Exactly how long is up to you but the ideal action sequence has something like fifteen to thirty ‘beats’ in it. (These are much like the beats in a beat outline, except each beat is a much smaller unit of time.) Like a plot as a whole your beats should ebb and surge, always building to the climax of your action scene.

On a very basic level, a plot is something happening. While it doesn’t necessarily follow that an action sequence, where more things happen than usual, equals more plot in a single scene it is true that people expect things to happen during a story. Unless, of course, your audience is the most elite of the literati, in which case things happening are probably actually a negative in your book. But for everyone else, a certain level of things happening is a must, and action sequences are a good way meet those expectations in a very attention getting fashion. Tune in next week and we’ll look at how to keep your audience invested in an action sequence.

Stumbling Blocks

Posted by natechen on

Writer’s block is widely viewed as the creative disaster and with good reason. When you sit down and. Just. Can’t. Write. It feels horrible. But rarely, in my experience, does the inability to write boil down to any one thing. Typically there’s a bunch of different things contributing to your inability to write and sometimes all you need to break the slump is to look at those things one at a time and determine if that’s your problem. By breaking things down writer’s block becomes a manageable problem. So here, in order of how often I find these things intruding in my writing, is a list of the typical building blocks of writer’s block and a suggestion on how you might deal with them.

  • Physical discomfort. Yeah, this is usually the biggest one for me. Sitting for a while results in cramps and sore muscles and getting up every so often to stretch, get the blood moving, ect, does wonders. Don’t discount hunger or thirst, either. While constant snacking while writing isn’t healthy, neither is starving yourself. A glass of water and a quick snack can do wonders to restore your concentration.
  • Stress. It’s an unfortunate truth that, while I enjoy doing theater or other such activities, juggling them all can often leave me too stressed or distracted to focus on writing. Now sometimes writing can serve as a bulwark between you and stress, allowing you to focus on something you enjoy while you recuperate for your next bout of stressful activity. But stress can build to the point where blocking it out for a time is not a healthy way of dealing with it. Sometimes you just need to slow down. Set writing aside and grab life with both hands for a while. Confronting the problem straight on, or slogging through a period of intense business with no distractions, is often the best way to get past this block. Constantly trying to write during times of high stress may make it harder to let go of the tension once the tough times are past, so it may be safer to just set writing aside for a while.
  • Lack of time (or sometimes laziness). This actually ties with stress in problems I have. Some stories need a lot of research, a lot of preparation and a lot of careful thought put into them. A case in point: If you’ve seen the Project Sumter Timeline you can see there are at least two major periods of time that are ripe for development. In fact, the story was originally supposed to focus on the Civil War, not the modern era. The early story ideas there just weren’t gelling because I didn’t know enough about the Western Theater of the Civil War to compile a good narrative. This situation is only nominally improved now. If a story needs more work than you’re putting into it and you don’t have the time maybe you need to simplify the story. Or maybe you need to shelve it and work on something else. Of course, if you do have the time, maybe you just need to focus more…
  • Convention. It’s very easy to get caught up in the idea that “this is how things should be”. For example, telepaths are almost always fearsome figures in paranormal fiction usually because they have ability to control people’s minds. How many stories can you do about that? How many different telepath characters can you create? But in Mindspace Investigations telepaths are feared more for their ability to directly manipulate the nervous system, knocking people unconscious with a touch or broadcasting pain so powerfully people keel over. The result is a  very different kind of telepath surrounded by different social dynamics and with different character quirks. Look over your story and make sure the tropes and conventions you’re using are empowering your story, not preventing it from going somewhere new and interesting. Because new and interesting is usually where stories need to go.
  • Original expectations. Sometimes you expect a story to go one way and it winds up somewhere else. Sometimes totally unexpected characters crop up in the background and start demanding attention. Under no circumstances can you let your original plot idea get in the way of where the story actually goes. Yes, make sure you stay on theme, but don’t be afraid of the extra work that comes with shifting focus to better suit the story you get rather than chasing the ghost of a story that may have never really existed.
  • Lack of ideas you like. Sometimes you can see stories places and just have no desire to follow up on them. Don’t force yourself. Instead grab a book, hit the movies or call up some friends and hang out and do something other than writing for a while. Give yourself a chance to recharge a little and soon enough your writer’s instincts will present you with something worthwhile. For me it usually takes fifteen minutes to an hour, but your mileage may vary.

Hopefully that helps you the next time you find yourself staring at a blank sheet of paper/word processor. Good luck!

Genrely Speaking: Low Fantasy

Posted by natechen on

Time to speak Genrely.  Low fantasy is, as you might expect, the polar opposite of high fantasy. Low fantasy plays around with many of the trappings of high fantasy but applies them to very different ends. The names of the genres kind of sum up the differences. While high fantasy focuses on the big ideas of the human condition low fantasy examines the minutia. Interestingly, it is possible to craft a story that mixes elements of high and low fantasy in one of the harder to quantify genres in existence (see Quintessence for one example).

So what is it that makes low fantasy what it is?

  1. An emphasis on characters who are not at all important in the scheme of things. The people who make up the central characters of a low fantasy story are not movers and shakers, not planning to overthrow governments and not wielders of forces that are out of the ordinary for their world. The scale of events and the people they focus on are, in some ways, much more normal than the typical fantasy stories.
  2. Focus on day to day activities. While this doesn’t exclude the kind of swashbuckling adventure that you’re accustomed to seeing in movies like The Lord of the Rings or reading about in The Chronicles of Narnia, the action in low fantasy ultimately has much less impact on the state of nations than the action in high fantasy. The genre simply assumes that there are people who do that kind of work for a living. There will always be tombs to rob, monsters to fight and evil wizards to put down. After a while it becomes kind of humdrum, and what does that mean for characters and societies?
  3. An abundance of magic. Magic in low fantasy tends to be commonplace. Not everyone knows how to use it but chances are everyone’s seen it a time or two. It tends to be of the sufficiently analyzed version, will come in all kinds in all kinds of shapes and sizes, might be tied in some way to a person’s ancestry or powerful artifacts, or follow any one of a dozen other rules, or just be available to anyone who takes the time to learn it. Its presence or absence in a situation is in no way significant.

What are the weaknesses of low fantasy? It tends to come off as the fantasy equivalent of status quo is god. The characters aren’t out for big purposes they are, at best, out to help a few people they know or just out for their own good. It can be hard to get invested in stories where nothing meaningful ever happens. Sure, the characters go out and have adventures but ten years later they’re sitting in the same bars, drinking and trying to figure out where their next big break will come from. I’m not saying stories about people in regular situations struggling with realistic problems are bad. But something about them cuts against the grain of a genre grouping that shares the same root with the word “fantastic” know what I mean?

What are the strengths of low fantasy? Low fantasy thrives on the way it proves ye olde maxim, the more things change the more they stay the same. We may not live in a world with flying carpets or travel between parallel earths but we can all appreciate the importance of paying the bills and keeping thieves and murderers off the streets – no matter how those crimes are accomplished.

At first glance low fantasy may look like an unappealing genre. Why add all the swords and sorcery if it’s ultimately incidental to the stories? Isn’t the author just being lazy, making sure they don’t have to research all the gritty little details of what they want to write about? Isn’t this a cop out?

The answer is, no. Low fantasy can act as a kind of insulation between the audience and the story. Some things may be uncomfortable when looked at in a way that hits close to home. By looking at these things through the perspective of the fantastic we can give the audience a degree of separation that makes these subjects easier to handle. Of course, by the same token the fantastic may turn off part of your audience as well. It’s important to know who you’re writing for, after all. What’s important is to take low fantasy on it’s own terms – stories of little people in big worlds. And after all, isn’t that what we all are?

Amazing vs. Spiderman – A Deconstruction

Posted by natechen on

A couple of weeks ago (actually, only a week at the time of this writing but longer once this actually goes up) I went to see The Amazing Spiderman 2. I’ve heard a lot about how Marc Webb’s Spiderman movies are superior to Sam Raimi’s, usually from the perspective of faithfulness to the comics, but personally I wasn’t sure what that was based on. I felt that Spiderman was a better movie than The Amazing Spiderman but then I’m not super familiar with the source material. People were saying the sequel was also really good, and that this new Spiderman franchise was shaping up to be great. So I went to see The Amazing Spiderman 2 expecting to see something better than the first movie.

I was… somewhat disappointed.

So I was thinking to myself, how can I turn this waste misapplication of time and money into something useful? Then I realized! It’s time for another episode of disappointment deconstructed!

OBLIGATORY SPOILERS WARNING! I CANNOT DISCUSS THE THINGS I WANT TO DISCUSS HERE WITHOUT SPOILERS! DO NOT READ PAST THIS POINT IF THAT BOTHERS YOU!

Okay, with the obligatory spoilers warning out of the way let me start by saying this analysis is going to be entirely about the writing of the first two Sam Raimi Spiderman movies and the first two Marc Webb Amazing Spiderman movies. Here are things that I’m not talking about:

  • Faithfulness to the comics version of the character. I’ve never read any large amount of Spiderman comics, although I have seen some of the 1990s Fox animated series. More on this later, but I just wanted to say –  I care more about the movie being as strong as it can standing alone than being totally faithful to the comic book character. Spiderman is like any comic book character who’s been around more than ten years – he’s been written by a lot of people in a lot of different ways, I’m not sure it’s fair to say there’s any one right way to depict him. The Raimi version may have been farther afield than most, but the real question is does that make the movies better or worse as movies?
  • Andrew Garfield and/or Toby Maguire. This isn’t about the acting in the films, most of the cast did well with what they were given. I think Garfield did a better job as Peter Parker in his two films than Maguire did. He’s better suited to the role, he felt more engaged in his performance and he’s got great physical humor skills. But you can hit a home run in a disappointing movie and the movie will still be disappointing.
  • Cinematography or effects. This have come a long way in ten years. It’s not really fair to compare them. They certainly don’t define how good a movie is.
  • The directors. While I’m going to be occasionally identifying these movie franchises as “Raimi’s” and “Webb’s” I do recognize that directors don’t usually have that much influence over the scripts they’re given. It’s just a way to refer to the movies without having to type out the longer titles – and the Spiderman movies are often tied back to Sam Raimi when they’re mentioned anyway. Why fight convention?
  • I’m not discussing the third movie in either franchise. One hasn’t been made yet, the other may as well not have been. ‘Nuff said.

So what, exactly, is it that disappoints me about The Amazing Spiderman and The Amazing Spiderman 2, particularly as compared to Spiderman and Spiderman 2?

Power vs. Responsibility 

Uncle Ben’s declaration that with great power comes great responsibility is such a classic piece of Americana that I knew it even before I’d seen or read any Spiderman at all. It’s supposed to be a foundational part of Peter Parker and Spiderman.

Raimi’s Spiderman takes this lesson to heart and becomes a costumed hero, defeats some villains and does his best to do it quickly, before anyone gets hurt. He feels bad about screwing up his job delivering pizzas, missing dates with his girlfriend and cutting class and, while he keeps doing what he knows needs to be done, he’s not sure he makes a difference. Spiderman eventually grows to the point where, when he faces down Doc Ock, he passes on what he knows – the Doc is the one to face up to what he’s done and clean up the mess he’s created, not Spiderman. Sure, Otto needed Spiderman there to smack sense back into him but ultimately the runaway fusion project is ended because Spiderman convinces Doc Ock of his responsibility to fix things, not because Spiderman is a hero.

Although in some ways teaching heroics to others might make him one.

Webb’s Spiderman doesn’t seem to learn anything about responsibility. He makes a promise to Captain Stacey which he clearly has no intention of keeping, wastes time yammering at crooks for no good reason instead of getting with the arresting, all while the city around him is shot up and run over by crazed Ruskies, and eventually sees another person he cares about die so he can relearn the lesson he supposedly learned when Uncle Ben died: he has an obligation to protect people with his abilities. Seriously, why did I sit through the second half of The Amazing Spiderman and 98% of The Amazing Spiderman 2 just to discover that Our Hero has made no appreciable character growth?

Most of the villains Spiderman confronts are representative of power without responsibility attached to it. Unfortunately all the slapstick antics Webb’s Spiderman spends his time on make it hard to see any contrast besides one of degree. Sure, Peter Parker’s not burning down the city or ruling the world but part of me wonders if a superpowered clown is really any better than a normal one…

Friendship vs. Obligation 

Harry Osborn is the son of Norman Osborn, heir to Oscorp and a friend of Peter’s. He’s supposed to serve as a kind of foil to Peter, they’re the opposites in terms of wealth, sociability and popularity.

In Raimi’s Spiderman we meet Harry almost as soon as we meet Peter. They hang out, they do stuff, they vie for Norman Osborn’s approval (well, more Harry tries to get some attention from his dad, Norman loves Peter).

Then Norman turns himself into the Green Goblin and fights Spiderman to the death. Harry never knows about his father’s alter ego but he does find Spiderman with Norman’s body, and forms a grudge. He knows Peter knows something about Spiderman and pressures his friend to do something to bring his father’s killer to justice. Suddenly Peter is caught between his friendship with Harry and his duty as Spiderman. It’s good, dramatic, character building stuff.

Webb’s Spiderman gets none of that. We don’t even see Harry until the second movie, we barely see Norman at all and he dies (of a genetic disease!) before he does a single thing of any significance. Peter doesn’t feel like he has any connection to any of the Osborns, except possibly through his parents who’s role in all this remains incredibly vague. Sure, Harry claims to have once been friends with Peter but we sure don’t see them acting like it much.

Harry and Peter’s friendship feels more like a plot contrivance here. They don’t have any real reason to know each other except that they need to argue with each other and a reason for Harry’s hating Spiderman needs to be established. This is achieved, but it’s sloppy and feels more than a little dumb. Instead of providing dramatic tension and giving character insight it just sort of sits there.

Acceptance vs. Rejection

Both Peter Parker and Spiderman are a kind of outcasts. Peter is ignored by his peers, Spiderman is reviled by a vocal portion of the general public. Both just want to be accepted for what they can do. This is one of the things that makes Spiderman effective as a teenaged and young adult superhero, as opposed to most superheroes who are depicted as mature, established adults. For must supers, even if their mask is hated they usually still have a stable secret identity to fall back on.

Now in Raimi’s Spiderman we get a sense of Peter as the exception to this rule. He delivers pizzas to make ends meet as a normal person and as Spiderman not only does the public view him with mixed feelings but J. Jonah Jameson, newspaper editor and occasional purchaser of Peter’s photographs of Spiderman, utterly loathes Spidey and is intent on destroying him in the press.

In short, Raimi’s Spiderman is in the middle of a classic teenager dilemma – no matter what he does he can’t seem to win. Why even bother? Other than Uncle Ben seemed to think it was a good idea, of course. And thus, conflict, character growth and story.

On the other hand, Webb’s Spiderman is… well, kind of a popular guy. At the least, the people of New York are happy to line up to help him in his final battle with the Lizardman and they all seem okay with standing around cheering during his fights with Electro. Sure, we’re told Jameson still hates the dude but we never see Jameson or hear any of his rants or really get any idea of how this makes Spiderman feel or how he struggles with it.

Gwen Stacey

Did anyone go to this movie not expecting her to die? Her death is apparently a major part of Spiderman’s character arc (or so I’m told.) I think it’s happened at least twice in the comics, maybe more. In fact, it is a trope.

So why waste two movies with her? Not to sound calloused, but the only reason to spend all this time on Gwen Stacey is to make a blatant bid to manipulate our emotions later on. I know that I’ve said the point of writing is to provoke a response but the key is to do it without being noticed.

It’d be one thing if Peter had started knowing Gwen, if she’d been the one bright spot for most of the first movie but we watched Spiderman slowly come between them – not necessarily as another love interest but just Peter’s new life interfering with his old – and they’d only come to an understanding as she died.

But instead we suffer through two movies of fairly unbelievable “romance” between the two of them, knowing that it can’t possibly go anywhere, until they finally kill her off. And, as I’ve said before, it doesn’t really feel like all this goes anywhere. Peter and Gwen don’t really grow as a result of all this. It’s just sort of there.

(Aside: if the writers really wanted to throw us for a loop they wouldn’t have killed off Norman Osborn without his doing anything. They would have let Gwen Stacey survive until the end of the series.)

In short, The Amazing Spiderman 2 was a mediocre movie at best. While it’s stars did a great job with the script they were given in the end there’s nothing there to elevate it out of the doldrums. In terms of writing it certainly wasn’t any better than Spiderman 2, although the acting may have been better. Should you not go see it? That depends on how much you like Spiderman and/or Marvel. If you’re a fan of either one, sure, go see the movie. You’ll be entertained. But I doubt you’ll still be raving about it in a year’s time. For my part, I’ve said my piece.

Writing Men: Last Full Measure

Posted by natechen on

Humankind cannot gain anything without giving something in return. 

-Principle of Equivalent Exchange, Fullmetal Alchemist

So. Writing men, a recap in four five links: Introduction. Objectivity. Axioms. Boxen. Smash!

People are different from things. This pretty much goes without saying, but for the purposes of this series of posts they’re actually kind of similar. After all, men don’t just test their things to the breaking point, they put themselves under the gun, too. Of course, in many respects the things I said last week about the importance of testing limits and knowing more about stuff applies to people as well as things. The difference comes in a willingness to take on sacrifice as a part of growth.

Now there’s a lot of talk about the evolution of gender roles, men as gatherers and women as allocators, feeling vs. thinking and what have you when modern people talk about men and women. I want to say that I’m not going to try and address any of that. Here’s what I do know: In my experience, men are far and away the more likely to face a situation where they want something and immediately ask themselves, “What do I have to do get that? Do I have to give something up? I’ll give up (fill in the blank) for that.”

And they’ll immediately be warned of the consequences of their decision by their sister/girlfriend/wife. Now, as with many of the things I’ve talked about in this post, this kind of behavior is by no means restricted to men. Women can, and do, make these kinds of tradeoffs all the time. Sacrifice is not gender specific.

The difference is, men tend to get excited about it. Men are objectively driven thinkers. They want to get somewhere. This is how they define themselves. What’s often missed in this equation is how much a man wants to get somewhere. The man who wants to own his own business, the man who wants to get the girl, the man who wants to get revenge, these are a few of the faces of the man with an objective. He cuts himself to the bone to get there, and he measures the importance of the goal by how much he’s willing to set aside to get there. As sacrifices pile up obviously he’s getting closer to where he wants to be, right?

Sacrifice is one of the ways men express themselves. It’s a sign of devotion, of value and of respect. Men sacrifice with a single purpose in mind. They know they’re going to pay for it, that there may be unintended consequences, that they’ll hate themselves later. But that (for whatever value of that) is worth the cost. For a man, the widespread consequences of laying something aside pale before the sheer excitement of the change they believe they’ll create.

In an interesting corollary, don’t be surprised if a man drops a goal if he finds he’s not willing to sacrifice to get to it. There’s a sort of know-thyself revelation in these things. Don’t want to pay the price for something? How much did you really want it? How does it stack up to all those other objectives you had?

Men are creatures of sacrifice. They have to be, it’s part of how they’re wired. As with all other aspects of manhood, this is neither a positive or a negative. I hammer this over and over again but this is one place where it particularly stands out. Society today tends to think of sacrifice as a negative, when we think of it at all. I think this has something to do with being a consumer society, we just want more we don’t think about cutting back very often. The one exception is in dreams and the future. People are often told to settle, that what they can get easily is enough. Enjoy it and don’t look for more.

And there’s nothing wrong with that advice in some situations. There are plenty of self-destructive kinds of sacrifice out there. The man who spends eighty hours at work every week so he can get to the top but never sees his family. The athlete who totally destroys his body in five years of competition and is a virtual cripple for the next forty years of his life. But can you really get anything worthwhile if you don’t give something up?

The alternative is to over glorify sacrifice, something that was more common in the past but isn’t talked about as much now. It does seem noble to set aside something you want to strive more totally for something else. These days we gloss over those kinds of costs but once upon a time that kind of devotion was highly praised. But if you’ve traded time with your family to slave away at a job that you’ll ultimately retire from totally alone, was the sacrifice really a good thing?

Objectives are in the future. Many of them cannot be reached without sacrifice and, as I’ve already said, sometimes when they’re called into doubt men give them up. But should they?

The American Civil War required that over 600,000 men sacrifice their lives. People still can’t agree over what they sacrificed for. But no one who’s been born and raised in the United States would disagree with Lincoln when he said they offered their last full measure of devotion. Even when we’re not sure what that meant, the fact of it still move us.

When writing men, then, the questions are these:

What will a man sacrifice?

What does he expect go gain from his sacrifice?

What will he actually gain?

How will the sacrifice change him?

Will it be worth it?

At the end of the day, the sum of a man is not measured in what he gave up and what he gained from it. Character, once created, cannot be destroyed. But as a man builds up and sacrifices, as his circumstances and mindset change over time with new frameworks for thought being set up, tested and cast aside, a man grows. Let that growth be the measure of him.

Writing Men: Planetary Annihilation

Posted by natechen on

A real man creates nothing! Not one blade of grass grows where he has walked! So the true warrior lives for one thing! Planetary Destruction!

–Zekka, Battle Angel Alita, Last Order

So. Writing men, a recap in four links: Introduction. Objectivity. Axioms. Boxen.

Today’s subject: Breaking things.

It’s generally accepted that men break things on purpose where as women break things accidentally, which is somehow more acceptable or appropriate than the alternative. What people don’t understand about the manly tendency to destruction is a set of principles we’ll call the Laws of Awesome Dynamics (not an actual set of laws). The First Law of Awesome Dynamics is the Law of Conservation of Awesome (distantly related to the Conservation of Ninitsu). The principle of Conservation of Awesome can be stated like this: Once created, awesomeness cannot cease to exist, only change hands.

The Second Law of Awesome Dynamics states that, when two object collide the more Awesome of the two survives carrying all of the awesomeness in the equation.

So, why do men break things? The answer is, they’re not breaking one thing. They’re taking two things and seeing which is more awesome.

That’s not always the case, of course. Sometimes a man will take an object and test it to its limits, until it breaks. Thomas Edison was a strong advocate of this as a method for testing new inventions. This process lets you know exactly how much punishment a thing can take before it gives. But for the most part, men are breaking things as a method of measurement.

Let us look at a situation that is almost as old as men are. There is a fellow with a shirt. At first it is just a normal shirt but then he goes and plays touch football and wins overwhelmingly. He doesn’t think of it until a few weeks later he plays another game wearing that shirt and wins overwhelmingly again. The next several games he wears that same shirt and can’t be stopped! Without his realizing it, a little of his achievements have been absorbed the shirt and are adding to his effectiveness in following games! It’s a lucky shirt! Soon the man can’t play or sometimes even watch football without it. Of course, sooner or later the shirt will give out – it can only take so much washing and wearing, diving for passes and “accidentally” slamming into people – and that will be a sad day. But in the mean time, the shirt’s ability to endure is an inspiration!

Okay, let’s be honest. All this is a kind of convoluted way of saying that men value endurance and fortitude, both in themselves and the things surrounding them. Do they sometimes engage in behavior that could destroy something of theirs? Well, yes, they do. But that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s for the purposes of seeing it break (in can be, and that’s not this principle, it’s something a little more sinister). Sometimes the whole point is to measure something. What will happen? How strong and enduring am I, are the things I own?

The quote at the top of this post is an example of this principle pushed to it’s greatest extreme. If a man is powerful and enduring enough he will outlast everything he encounters. While that, in and of itself, may not be an appealing prospect it is the core of the matter.

Men test themselves and things around them, typically through some kind of competition. Not always violent, but men are more likely than women to recognize the value of controlled violence in competition. They want to know how far they can go, how reliable they are, how their limits will support or deprive them of their goals. These things cannot just be theorized about, they must be tested in the field. And if a man hurts himself in the process, well, sometimes that’s the price you pay for knowing.

When writing men, they must test things. Test them to the breaking, if they must. The testing will inform all that comes after. Oh, a man may be upset if something he truly loved is broken in the process. He may be angry, he may be sad but in the end he will be better off for it. After all, the Second Law says the awesomeness goes to the one who survives.

And, oddly enough, that brings us to our next principle. We’ll take a look at it next week.

Themes

Posted by natechen on

Writing is the process of taking ideas and putting them down on paper. All ideas have consequences, both the immediate and the more abstract, and exploring those consequences is part of what writing exists for. Most of the immediate consequences of ideas are explored in the plot, the series of events that the protagonist and his or her immediate sphere of influence are involved in. And, of course, the characters themselves  Themes, on the other hand, are a little bit different.

Let’s take a fairly well known work of fiction and examine the themes in it, shall we?

The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark is a classic work of literature. It goes beyond stagecraft – people read the play just to get at the rich literary depth therein. Among other things, we still occasionally hear of the dangers of becoming a Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. Hopefully you’re familiar with the story already, if not, or if you’re rusty, the Wikipedia page can bring you up to speed.

There are basically three themes in Hamlet:

Death. (Newsflash – everyone dies at end of Shakespearean tragedy!) The play begins in the aftermath of a murderer and doesn’t end until almost every last character we’ve seen on stage for the past few hours has suffered of poison, blade or both!

Revenge. The death of Hamlet’s father is what sets things in motion and his quest for revenge is the driving force behind the plot.

Insanity. Not only does Hamlet feign insanity and his lady love actually go insane, the presence of a ghost that many people see, yet others do not, suggests that more might actually be insane than is readily apparent. Of course, Hamlet’s thirst for vengeance looks a lot like insanity as well, complete with grizzly consequences in the death of Polonius, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. And some might say that the drive to murder that we see in Claudius and Gertrude is a kind of insanity as well.

Now you might say that these themes are a part of the plot – and you’re right. But where plot and characters exist in a kind of dialog, with characters able to adapt to the plot or the plot following characters as they run off the beaten path, themes constrain them both.

In Hamlet there are many opportunities for characters to avoid death. Something as simple as not believing the words of a ghost that could be a figment of the imagination or a demon in disguise would have kept Hamlet from his path of revenge. Instead, the themes of the story keep the characters and plot from wandering off track.

I’ve said before and I’ll say again, the primary purpose of fiction is to provoke a reaction from the reader. Every aspect must be carefully tailored with an end in mind, every plot point drive towards the eventual end of the story. Now the audience might not walk away with your desired reaction in mind but that’s just the nature of art. The point is to allow the drive to structure your art, that it might be as clear and as meaningful as possible. Even if the audience sees things differently than you, the strength of your purpose will come through in some form.

Themes are what give your story that strength. Just as the skeleton gives your body a great part of its strength, anchoring your muscles, so theme is a vital part of what anchors plot and character and keeps them from fighting one another. Hamlet’s themes are what keep the character Hamlet’s rage strong yet let him give his despairing “to be, or not to be” soliloquy. They allow for glimpses of humor, but only from gravediggers plying their trade. Ultimately, they allow us to feel the full weight of the decision to murder and to avenge.

Your themes are an essential part of your story. If you are going to write, you must start with a theme. Let it shape your plot, your characters and drive you to your ultimate ends. Don’t throw out things that don’t fit with your theme – that’s what Graveyarding is for – but keep your eye firmly on the goal. It will make your writing that much stronger.

Genrely Speaking: Military SciFi

Posted by natechen on

Welcome back to Genrely Speaking, the part of the blog where we sit down and look at modern genres and what we mean when we mention them on this blog. Classifying things is as much art as science, so having style guides is important for you if you want to be clearly understood. Thus we get a monthly segment. This week’s genre: Military Sci-Fi.

Military sci-fi is a subgenre of science fiction (surprise!) and, if you’ve read enough of the previous entries in this subsection you know that sci-fi is the genre that examines human ideas. Military sci-fi is most closely related to hard sci-fi in that it takes ideas of human development in general, and military development specifically, and applies them to craft a tale about human ingenuity and courage. You can usually spot it a mile away by the title of the story and what’s on the cover, but once you get inside you’ll also find the following hallmarks of the genre:

  1. An emphasis on the idea of necessity as the mother of invention. Many people will quote the idea that wars drive progress, and that’s true to an extent. Wars will cause a lot of resources to be focused on solving a very narrow slew of problems. While normally money and attention is spent on whatever problems people think need solving at the moment, during war (or at least total war such as we last witnessed a generation ago during World War Two) the needs of the military override the preferences of individuals or nonmilitary groups. A big focus of military sci-fi is how this unusual confluence of money, time and intellect comes together to produce results in ways that are sometimes quite surprising.
  2. An examination of the interface of technology and conflict. Whether the author is Taylor Anderson examining what would happen if you dropped WWII era technology into a war fought with sailing vessels and crossbows or Ian Douglas spinning tales of daring and bravery backed by the bleeding edge theories of reactionless propulsion and sentient computer technology, military sci-fi examines how warfare will change, how it will stay the same and how people will adapt to the situation.
  3. Sound military theory. The more things change the more they stay the same. There’s a reason Sun Tzu’s The Art of War is such an enduing treatise on conflict – much of what it says is valid in just about any kind of conflict, regardless of whether it’s armed or political, futuristic or primitive, if you apply it correctly. The military sci-fi author recognizes that and relies on this and many other examinations of military theory to create their scenarios. Of course, if you’re writing in this genre it’s also important to keep an eye on the less tangible aspects of war – endurance, determination, courage and principles.

What are the weaknesses of military sci-fi? It can be a very impersonal genre. Military histories, the style of nonfiction our genre most closely resembles, tends to focus on leaders and decision makers, and the facts and figures they use to reach their decisions. This is because warfare is a vast and chaotic undertaking and even decades after the fact it can be hard to find a clear picture of what took place. But fiction is ultimately a much more personal thing than nonfiction. We don’t want facts and figures, we want suspense, empathy with characters, memorable dialog and exciting plot twists. While military sci-fi can deliver on all of that, it can be hard to do and not every author does it well.

What are the strengths of military sci-fi? It’s big, bombastic and fun. If properly written it delivers rousing speeches, sudden reversals and snatches victory from the jaws of defeat. It can be like Lord of the Rings, Star Trek and Saving Private Ryan all rolled into one and there’s no doubting that, when it really works, it’s good stuff.

There’s a thin line between cool geek and irredeemable dweeb. With the mainstreaming of comics/graphic novels and other traditionally “geek” media over the past ten years that line keeps getting harder and harder to define. But military sci-fi remains so far into dweeb territory that you can’t even see geek from there. I like the genre, myself, but I don’t think anything I’ve ever read in it would make my top five books of a given year, much less all time. If you love geeky gizmos check it out. Otherwise, you might want to look elsewhere…