Yeah, Write

My wife and I have been playing catch-up on Dancing With The Stars for the last two weeks. ABC makes all its prime-time shows available for free on their website the day after they air, so we rolled-back to the beginning of the season, cuddled up on the couch and queued it up.

I am not a devotee of reality shows. Despise them, in fact. All that faked-up conflict and people spouting sound bites at each other for the benefit of the camera makes me ill. We mute a lot of commercials so we don't have to listen to a "worst-of" parade of insults and trash talk during the shows we do like.

So why did we start watching Dancing?

Lesson #1: It's about people
I happened to see a list of the celebrities this season and the thought of seeing them dance was intriguing. Marlee Matlin, deaf actress who won the Best Actress for Children of a Lesser God, dancing? How does that work? Penn Gillette, the taller and more obnoxious half of the magic/comedy duo Penn and Teller? He's about seven feet tall and built like Bigfoot. Kristi Yamaguchi, Olympic gold medal-winning figure-skater? Oh, she's going to kick so much butt...

Lesson #2: It's not about technique
Every second show is a "results" show with musical guests and featured professional dancers. When Jose something-or-other, world rhumba champion and Kathy whats-her-name, two-time American Foxtrot champion come out to show you what pros can do when they have a "real" partner, I'm instantly bored. It's just a bunch of dancing. Which is fine, I guess, but I wouldn't watch two episodes a night for two weeks, no matter how technically spectacular.

Some writers tackle spectacular subjects, delving into the ramifications and twists of an alternate reality or world-changing event and try to wow you with their insight and daring. Their characters are robots who do what their choreographer tells them, but they're nobody. I can't get into stuff like that.

Others do the same with setting, trying to wow you with what it's like to sit on this veranda, staring at those mountains with the sun coming through the trees just so... Snore.

Lesson #3: It's about struggle
These are not professional dancers. They're not in dance shape, even though two of them are athletes. They learn one or sometimes two new dance routines a week for almost 3 months, starting from zero in most cases. The learning curve is a cliff.

After six seasons of shooting this show, they know how to package the stars so you engage with them as people. They struggle like mad week after week, half of them in way over their heads, but every Monday they step into the arena. It's a hero's journey for every couple, in the Joseph Campbell sense, with a smokin' hot twenty-something in the Obi-Wan Kenobi role.

Lesson #4: It's about bad things happening to good people
Half of the stars invited on this show came into it with no real hope of winning. They wanted to have some fun, learn to dance a little, perform in front of an audience, charge (or recharge) their careers. Several came in with something to prove about their particular minority.

But every week they didn't get sent home, hope grew. Every week they weren't the worst on the stage, desire sharpened. You could see them coming alive; the hangdog expressions faded, the backs straightened, they found joy where they least expected it.

Then one day, the axe fell on them, and it tore their heart out.

They put on a good face, talked about how fantastic it was, but it's the Oscar nominee speech: I'm happy just to be here in such distinguished company.

Then the day came (for me it was this past Monday) when there wasn't anybody left you could stand to see leave. But they sent one home anyway, and that's the weirdest lesson of all...

When it comes to stories (and that's really what this is to us), we like to get our hearts broken.

What a strange, illogical and glorious species we are.

I've recently joined a writing site: The Next Big Writer. It's devoted to writers submitting work-in-progress and exchanging reviews with an eye toward improvement. It's exactly what I've been looking for since I completed June Betrayals and I joined with high hopes. I haven't had other writers critiquing my work in a long time and I'm sure it will turbo-charge my writing. "This is your writing... this is your writing on Red Bull."

Only one problem. Criticism is enough to make you bi-polar.

I've received two kinds of reviews so far: "fanboy" and "where to begin?"

Fanboy reviews taste great: they're full of unabashed prose about what a wonderful job you're doing and how they'd probably buy it as-is if they ran across it in the bookstore. They can give you confidence that you've struck gold, but are useless when it comes to boosting the quality of the work, which is why I signed up.

Receiving a fanboy review is a Sally Fields Moment: "You like me! You really, really like me!" Once you've had a chance to cool off, doubt creeps in. Maybe they're kissing up to get a good rating and don't care about helping you improve. Maybe they like everything they read, which means their accolades don't mean much. Do I sound neurotic? Guilty as charged.

"Where to begin" posts usually butter you up a bit at the beginning, like a doctor saying "this will only hurt a little." Then they crack their knuckles and start pummeling you. Are you unaware passive voice is evil? Did you mean to imply that character X has inappropriate urges toward farm equipment? Is character Y dead (because they're lifeless as an old stump)? Can't your character just say things instead of having to "growl" and "chirp" and "bark" everything? Are we at the zoo?

These posts suck. No matter how politely they're phrased, how carefully they avoid making it personal, every line stings because it's something you could have noticed yourself if you weren't the lamest writer ever to violate a word-processing program with your dreck. You suck, your words suck, your computer and internet connection probably suck, too.

Just because these reviews hurt doesn't mean they aren't exactly what I need. Criticism isn't comfort food, it's medicine. Comfort food tastes good, finishes bad. I can't count how many slices of pizza I've eaten while saying, "I'm going to regret this later."

Criticism is medicine. Medicine tastes terrible going down, but it gives your body what it needs to get stronger and beat back what ails you. There's nothing noble about walking around hacking up phlegm and saying "I'm going to whip this thing on my own." You're just wasting your time and making the ones around you miserable.

The reason criticism works so well is that a different perspective is worth 50 IQ points. Just coming at something from a different angle with a different set of preconceptions and knowledge makes subtle things obvious. If two people of equal ability and experience exchange critiques, they each come off looking like geniuses because they see things in your blind spot with perfect clarity and vice-versa.

Healthy criticism makes healthy stories. But this is going to hurt a little.

What's wrong with this scene?

Sheryl tossed her rich, luxurious mane of raven-black hair over her shoulder, the late-afternoon sunlight filling it with highlights. "Kiss me," she said.

Rico took a long, leisurely sip of his Sumatran double-expresso, the half-and-half and two packets of raw cane sugar helping it slide down his throat like liquid gold. He set it back on the saucer and moved it slightly to make room for his elbow on the tiny, black powder-coated cafe table. "What if I don't want to?" he asked, flicking a crumb of his long-finished scone from the crease of his copper-colored silk trousers.

She laughed, long and low, her voice surprisingly deep for a slender, toned woman with a dancer's physique. A hank of her hair fell across one side of her face, casting it into shadow and making her look even more mysterious than she did already. "Oh, you want to," she said.

His gaze burned into her, his longing to kiss her visible on his face like a neon sign. People driving by the front windows of the cafe could tell how much he wanted to kiss her. Astronauts orbiting overhead could tell. He was terrible at hiding it. "There's no faulting your confidence," he chuckled, even though he really, really, really wanted to kiss her. She was so beautiful he couldn't think of anything else.

Need a hint? Here it is again.

"Kiss me," Sheryl said.

Rico flicked a crumb from the crease of his trousers. "What if I don't want to?"

"Oh, you want to." She let her hair fall across her face.

He chuckled. "There's no faulting your confidence."

What's the main difference between those two versions? Length, obviously. The first is most of a page: 223 words. The second is only 36. But why the difference in length? How to decide what to chop and what to leave?

The second version is 100% story. The only things left either advance the scene, express emotions in the characters or evoke them in the reader, preferably more than one.

The first version is drowning in detail. A laundry list of irrelevancies that don't do any of the above. What does it tell us that he drinks Sumatran coffee? Would he be a different person in any significant way if it were Brazilian? Do we care that the crumb is from a scone? Are muffin crumbs symbolically inferior? What about the color of the table?

Much of it is repetitive, as well. Her body is slender and toned and a dancer's physique. Commuters, astronauts and Rico know he wants to kiss her. Really, really, really wants to, in case you weren't paying attention.

It's noise. Static on the radio. Glare on the television screen. It feels like story when you're writing it, but it's actually interfering with our ability to read the parts that really matter.

So how to differentiate noise from story? The question to ask is always the same:

What is the purpose of this scene?

This is a flirting scene. Flirting is about the tension between desire and denial. Anything that contributes to the flirting should be kept. Anything that doesn't advance it is detracting from it.

What we leave are significant details. There are exactly seven:

• She tells him to kiss her. Not many women do that. What does that tell us about her?
• Instead of doing what he's told - as most men would - he plays it cool, flicking a crumb from his trousers. Again, that makes him unusual. Why isn't he responding? Is he not interested? Playing hard to get? Scared? Gay?
• He deflects her with a flippant question, taking control of the situation while teasing her, increasing the tension.
• Her reply further demonstrates her confidence. She isn't the sort of woman to be put off easily. More tension.
• The hair in her face ups the seduction. She's trying to break his resolve, and likely enjoying herself in the bargain.
• He acknowledges her ploys and charms with a chuckle, complimenting her without words.
• He finishes with a backhanded compliment, encouraging her while reiterating that things will progress on his schedule, not hers.

Easier to read, more powerful, and we've freed up 187 words that we can use to ratchet up the tension instead of wasting them on copper-colored pants and raw cane sugar.

So take a hard look at a scene that's been frustrating you. Ask yourself "what is the purpose of this scene?" Then take out your machete and start hacking, because I'd be willing to bet that in the center is a powerful, emotionally-charged story that only needs a bit of noise-reduction to really shine.

First you create your protagonist, then you create an antagonist to prevent them from getting what they want. That’s one of the basic tools of character-oriented writing lessons. This makes it easy to write lessons, but hard to write really good fiction, because your protagonist’s most constant enemy is him/herself.

This is particularly true of continuing dramas, though it’s a relatively recent discovery. Many modern TV dramas¹ understand that the old-fashioned “anthology” technique (where each show can be shown in reruns in any order because the main characters never evolve) isn’t nearly as satisfying as the “soap opera” technique where what happens in this episode is crucially dependent on the events of last episode. Modern characters must arc over the course of a season and a series to become real.² What do they arc over? Their flaws.

Super-villains won’t save you

The problem with the “super-villain” approach to fiction is that bad actions don’t all come from bad people. On the contrary: they have the most meaning when a good person is caught in a moment of weakness or high emotion and does something rash. We are frail, we are victims of our own emotions. When I’m angry, I say and do things that are beneath me, and I know this as soon as I’ve calmed down. These actions cause me regret and guilt, but there is no way to make them right. For a writer, there’s gold in them thar hills…

Consider this sequence: a good person, in a moment of weakness or heightened emotion, does something uncharacteristically bad which cannot be undone (the course of life has been irreversibly altered), and spends the rest (or at least a good portion) of the story trying to undo or make up for the action. Spiderman failing to stop the robber who kills his uncle Ben is still shaping his character hundreds of comics and three movies later.

Fear and guilt are very powerful emotions, especially for people considered “good” by society. Other people stick up for you when you are accused, which makes you feel more guilty, knowing their trust is misplaced.

In praise of thorny questions

Is one failing enough to damn a person forever? This is a thorny question. If a man cheats on his wife, but she forgives him and he never does it again, is he still damned? Even if they stay together fifty years? If a person kills in a fit of rage, can anything they do in their subsequent life redeem that? If a man murdered a colleague with premeditation and got away with it, but later discovered a cure for cancer, do the scales even out?³ Sometimes this sort of character is called an “anti-hero” because they’ve got bad laced through the good inside them, but I think we all have some anti-hero in us, and all three-dimensional characters should, too.

This was one of the main sub-texts of Buffy and Angel: can Angel and Spike, who have done horrible things in the past when they were “not themselves” redeem themselves with enough conscious good deeds? Faith addresses this when she says, “Have you thought about how many people we’ve saved? Gotta be thousands, right? I think one innocent bystander still leaves us in the positive column.”

Easy questions with easy answers don’t help us a damn. It’s the thorny ones, with difficult, complicated, even impossible answers that we can spin into timeless tales that stay with the reader.

Thickening the plot

Most of the evil in a character-driven story about comes from people being weak. We’re not all weak, and we can be very strong in the main, but when bad things do happen, it is because of the emotional failings of the characters. Someone failing in the face of temptation is an excellent engine for a story.

Even if you’re a “plot-driven” writer who leans more toward James Bond and less toward Jane Austen, your car chases and crime scenes will be heightened and your series character more compelling with a healthy dose of self-destruction.

Not everybody has to be “broken”; that’s probably overkill. But everyone has flaws, and as the saying goes: character comes from action and action comes from character. That note in your character sketch that says “Bix has a terrible temper” doesn’t mean anything until she blows her stack in a scene.

But as long as a plotline stems from someone being weak, even for just a moment, you’ve got something to work with.

1. Buffy, Angel, Grey’s Anatomy and Galactica are personal favorites [↩]
2. Not that I consider soap operas to be the best example of good characterization. [↩]
3. Remember, the things we want in life generally doesn’t match the things we want in fiction. [↩]

Everybody seems to be talking about marketing these days. As a programmer, we always took Dilbert's "Welcome to Marketing: Two Drink Minimum" attitude about marketers as a breed, but I've run across at least two gurus of the art that make it seem not only credible as vocation, but interesting, entertaining and potentially profitable. Seth Godin is one, and Malcolm Gladwell, author of THE TIPPING POINT, is the other.¹

Malcolm Gladwell's head resembles nothing as much as a tiny black-powder explosion...

(more...)

1. This is a really long post, so I'm experimenting with a "jump". Bear with me if it all goes wrong. [↩]

In any long-term endeavor, there are going to be times when you don't feel like doing your work. Days when you just can't face the keyboard, canvas, whatever. During these periods it's very easy to hate what you're doing or wonder if it's worth doing at all.

An important thing to note is that once you're into it, once you've warmed up and let the world fall away from you, it's almost impossible to hate what you're doing.

During the down times, when you're procrastinating instead of doing your work, this should be your mantra: when I get to the middle, I'll find the joy. When I get to the middle, I'll find the joy. Then when it comes, allow yourself to feel it, be replenished by it. Don't stop working; just acknowledge that this is what happiness is and that you have found it.

It's worth sitting through the agony of the first fifteen minutes, when you're stone-cold and dumb as a stump, to get to that first accidental chord that makes you do a double-take, or a character turning left instead of right, to get to that question mark that demands you answer it. Then you fall through the hole in the paper or start riding the melody line and all is right with the world.

When I get to the middle, I'll find the joy.

Everybody argues about whether it's plot or character that's the source of good fiction. Of course, it's a trick question: the real answer is that there is no real plot that doesn't derive from character and no way to show character except by their reactions to plot. But I'm starting to think both of these miss the point. The works I really and truly adore derive their succulent power from relationships.

My greatest writing hero is Joss Whedon. He's the creator and driving force behind 3 of my favorite dramatic series of all time: Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel and Firefly. The opening sequence of "Serenity", the movie extension of the tragically short-lived Firefly TV series, is a masterpiece of film-making on at least 3 levels: cinematography, economy of language and character development. Joss introduces his entire crew of eight characters,¹ tells us what they do on the ship, how they interact and what matters to them in probably the longest single camera shot since Alfred Hitchcock's "Rope".

Oh, yeah... and the whole time the ship is this close to burning up during re-entry.

How does he do it? A classic SF info-dump? Some ninety-second blast of exposition beginning with "As you know, Captain..."? A slow crawl of yellow type yammering on about trade agreements with the planet Naboo? Hell, no.

Arguments. Five of them in a row. Some of them no more than two sentences long. Each as distinct and beautiful as jade chess pieces. What Captain Malcolm Reynolds says to his pilot, his lieutenant, his muscle, his mechanic and the ship's doctor in that single sequence describes the entire dynamic of this crucible called Serenity. It also sets him up as a larger-than-life figure: anyone who can have a coherent argument with his entire crew is a man to be reckoned with. I've talked with people who'd never watched the series, had no idea what they were walking into, but by the end of that scene felt completely at home in the world.²

That scene wasn't an accident. The history of all three series³ bears out this credo: it ain't got a thing if the ensemble ain't got that swing.

Author Jenny Crusie has two brilliant essays on her website about the work of Joss Whedon and reading them really brought home for me why Buffy and Angel are so addicting.⁴

No man is an island. True. But even if one was⁵ there wouldn't be anything to say about them! People are only people by their relationships with other people. This is in part about conflict, sure, but people agreeing with one another can be a defining moment, especially when you can feel their hearts breaking as they do it.

Let's take Cordelia Chase, for instance. A minor character in the early days of Buffy, Cordy became a central figure for most of Angel's run. By the end,⁶she was my favorite of the cast and her swan song episode possibly my favorite of the run.

Taken alone, Cordy is a shallow, self-absorbed beauty queen that deserved all the loathing the Buffy cast lumped on her. But through her interactions with the other characters, her "layers" begin to show and she matures into a real hero and a real woman. Her perpetually-bemused relationship with Xander Harris on Buffy, then later with Grue on Angel forced her to face the fact that perhaps her goals in life "marry rich, divorce richer" weren't actually where her joy was after all. By the time her relationship with Angel begins to develop, she is -- and we are -- ready for it to be as powerful as it deserves.

The complicated relationship between Buffy and her Watcher/father figure/punching bag Giles is another example. By the legendary musical episode "Once More With Feeling" in the sixth season,⁷ he realizes his role as her surrogate father at almost the same moment that he must step aside in order for her to become a woman. His duet with Tara (who expresses similar torment over her doomed relationship with Willow) "Wish I Could Stay" peaks with the line "Believe me, I don't want to go... And it'll grieve me 'cause I love you so..." If that doesn't break your heart, you don't have one.

I could beat this into the ground -- it's possible I already have -- by talking about Buffy and Spike, Spike and Dru, Angel and Xander⁸ or Willow and magic. The examples are strewn across the Buffyverse like semi-precious stones. Joss didn't put them there as lessons, he put them there to tear your heart out and make you beg for more, but that doesn't mean we can't learn from him anyway.

The cult of conflict states: they must fight to keep our interest. Interest is not enough: it sells our creative birthright short by a mile. I say: it's how they fight that makes us fall in love.

1. The ship Serenity herself is the eighth [↩]
2. Let me take a few seconds to let my heart stop pounding. Honestly, the guy's a rock star. [↩]
3. Abbreviated as Firefly's was [↩]
4. My wife and I inhaled them on DVD, two and three episodes every night for months. [↩]
5. Tom Hanks in Castaway, for instance [↩]
6. I won't steal Ms. Crusie's thunder by discussing the last half-season. Read the essay. [↩]
7. Don't get me started; we'll be here all night. [↩]
8. No, that's not what you think; they're just both in love with Buffy [↩]