Secret Genre Identities

I written before about how genres are built up of conventions and expectations.  But times change and sometimes genres have to adapt to keep up.

The obvious example would be the old cowboy movies that inspired a generation of children to play Cowboys and Indians.  Westerns today acknowledge the cultural complexity and diversity of Native Americans.  Besides, they were here first.

And the role of women, in just about any genre, has changed a good deal since the 1950’s.  And the spy genre is still adapting to the end of the cold war.

But it isn’t always the sledge hammer of political correctness.  Sometimes the changes are a little more subtle.  Sometimes the tropes just get tweaked a little, here and there.  In the current super-hero space, for example, the secret identity has been devalued.  It’s still there – it’s too central to the concept to toss aside, but it’s not the same. 

You rarely see a story these days that centers around a hero’s close friend almost stumbling on the big secret.  Clark Kent and Bruce Wayne no longer pretend to be bumbling idiots just to contrast their super lives.  And where it used to be only one or maybe two at most knew a hero’s identity, now the secret is commonly shared.  Heroes call each other by their personal names.  Clark married Lois.  Heck, even Aunt May knows who Spider-Man is.

There are a number of reasons for the change – we’re not really a culture that values humility and anonymity.  No one gets a promotion by being just another office drone.  And we live in an information age where personal privacy has become something that needs actively defending.  I think the heroes have adapted fairly well, considering such a central genre trope is no longer a good fit for the times and customs.

Deploy the Backburners

Sometimes we have ideas that we just can’t stop to think about right now.  So we set them aside, to some dark corner of our minds, where they continue to grow.  I believe the idiom is “putting it on the back burner.” 

I have a fairly large back burner.  But this may not be unusual – for all I know, every one does.  As a writer, it is useful to look back there occasionally and see what’s cooking.

I’ve had a rant in my head for years asking why anyone would want to grow up in a nation that appears to value youth over age.  And another about how a global communications network will not create a world of peace and understanding and may, in fact, have the opposite impact.

One day, years ago, I’m writing this play and have a scene where I need conversation for an awkward dinner date between a man who needs to grow up a little and a woman who is a bit of a techie.  Out come the rants and the scene practically writes itself.  And the characters have something interesting and thoughtful to say.

After all, it’s stuff I thought about for years.

Of course, it doesn’t always work out that well.  Here’s a counter example:  I’ve had this idea for a play in which the characters trap a vampire in the basement, not realizing just how cruel and dangerous a creature they’ve cornered.  And I had this great speech, in which the vampire justifies her existence by claiming to be a living historical memory.  Great speech, with mythological references, poetic meter, and layers of metaphor.

When I finally get around to writing the play, however, the speech doesn’t fit.  It sounds too different from everything else in the play.  It sticks out, it spoils the rhythm, it looks like the author’s favorite pet doing an unnecessary cameo appearance.

So I had to cut it.  Had the damn thing for years, and it ends up on the cutting room floor.  So it goes.

It’s commonly held that works of art are expressions of the artist’s ideas and creativity.  But sometimes, for the end result to be a quality product, we don’t get to say everything we want to.

Concerning Dungeons and Sonnets

So I was designing a dungeon the other day (if you need to ask, the answer would  disappoint) using ready made architectural tiles.  It reminded me of writing sonnets.

Just using pen and paper for my map would have been faster and easier.  But the result would be less impressively three dimensional. 

The question has been asked – why, if your poem could be anything, would you accept the limits of the sonnet form? Why write a poem of exactly 140 syllables, no more, no less?  The answer is that sometimes limits force us to use our creativity.  Finding just the right word that fits the requirements of the sonnet means digging through the unused portion of your vocabulary.

The results – dungeon or sonnet – are different than your usual work.  And sometimes the results will surprise you.

And it is true of any art form.  Writing for the stage, for example, has very different limits than writing for a movie.  How we meet these challenges – well, that’s where the fun is.

Strange Reverses

Conventional writing wisdom tells us that dramatic interest is generated by placing characters in conflict.  I’m  not saying it isn’t true, but I’d like to mention a couple of effective techniques I’ve seen that run a little bit counter to the notion – The Reversal and the Optimistic Cliffhanger.

Readers and audiences are quite accustomed to the notion of conflict in stories – they expect to see their heroes in peril (for horror and adventure stories) or in some emotional, social, or moral turmoil.  But they also like to see conflict resolved.  And it’s fun when the resolution doesn’t occur quite when you’d expect.

The Reversal is an old literary device when the fortunes of the protagonist change suddenly and unexpectedly.  The cool bit is that it works when the change is in favor of our hero.  It works particularly well when our hero creates the change in fortune, so his or her actions save the day. 

Isn’t that what’s supposed to happen anyway?  Sure, but the key to the Reversal is that it happens at an unexpected time.  Also, the Reversal isn’t necessarily the point where everything is tied up nicely with a pretty bow on top – its the point where things turn in favor of the hero, who may still have a fair bit of work to do before all conflicts are resolved.  But now, for the first time in several pages, we’re looking forward to the resolution instead of dreading it.

Not wanting to give specific spoilers here, but the second Star Trek movie, Wrath of Khan includes a great reversal if you need an example.

There’s a newer, similar technique that I’ve observed primarily in serial entertainments such as TV shows and comic books.  It doesn’t have an official term that I’m aware of, so I’ll call it the Optimistic Cliffhanger.  In a traditional cliffhanger, the episode stops at the worst possible moment for the hero.  (Note that cliffhangers work in novels, too – look for them at the end of chapters.)

The Optimistic Cliffhanger occurs when the episode ends a few minutes later – just after the hero has escaped from the trap.  The dramatic tension that keeps the pages turning, that keeps us coming back for the next episode, is generated by the promise of what the hero is going to do next.  Instead of ending when the villain plunges the hero into the tank full of sharks, it ends with the hero soaking wet, heading after the villain and grinning, “Now it’s my turn!”

It is interesting to me that both of these techniques draw their power from the promise of resolution.  They form that dramatic points in which the hero starts to create the resolution of the story, the point where we as readers suddenly realize that success might actually be possible.

Points of Interest

The hero of your story has just arrived at a remote village.  The village serves some plot function – maybe it is a place for the hero to rest and recover, or learn something, or maybe it needs to be defended against hordes of killer penguins.

But aside from its plot function, it’s really just a village.

How to we make it something more?  The key here is providing points of interest to our audience.  Something to make the place real, to make the people of the village come alive.

First, there are the minor details that add up.  Does the village have interesting street names? Does it grow crops, raise horses, sell the best  household waste disposal robots in fifty parsecs?  Then there are the living details – maybe there’s a funeral going on when our hero arrives.  Or a romance going on between the farmer’s son and the blacksmith’s daughter.

What does any of this have to do with the advancement of the plot?  Absolutely nothing.  Which means there is a danger of spending too much time and attention on it.  But without something, the village is boring.

And authors never want to be boring.

Besides, some side detail may grow into something important.  These happy moments happen in writing.  It’s part of the creative process.  The blacksmith’s daughter may remind our hero of something important.  Or maybe the best household waste disposal robots in fifty parsecs are just what we need to deal with those pesky penguins.

Dialogue, or Talking about Talking

I gotta write more scripts.  I like the format.  When I first started writing on the bus, on my shiny new halfling-size laptop, the first thing I did was a short radio play.  Now, after struggling with the novel format, my blog is late this week because I’ve been happily writing a web-comic strip.

The radio play was especially fun because there was no stage action – the whole story had to be told in voice.  I like dialogue.  I hope I’m good with it.   And in scripts, dialogue is the primary way in which character is revealed.  And dialogue and action together pretty much make up the whole story.

In novels, the author can get inside the character’s head.  Thoughts, feelings, musings… all can be presented easily.  You’d think novel writing would therefore be easier – more tools for the author to build the tale. 

But there is something to be said for the challenge of working on a limited canvas. (Is a limited color palate a better analogy?)  It forces you to be deliberate, to make meaningful and powerful choices in order to get the best use out of the tools you’ve got.  Or, to continue the analogy, to use bold colors.

Even in the novel format, dialogue is a powerful tool.  I have noticed that good authors reveal new information in dialogue as well as in text.  Despite having access to a character’s thoughts, sometimes we don’t learn their conclusions until the character tells someone else.  More dramatic that way.

I think part of the appeal of dialogue is it’s how we learn about people in real life.  We judge others by what they say and do.  It’s all we’ve got, really.  So we learn from the time we’re children to decipher words and phrases, to listen for double meanings, to see when people’s words don’t add up, to decide who to believe.

Dialogue therefore commands our attention.  It’s our life.

Time Compression and Narration

I understand that a typical mistake made by amateur movie makers is showing too much establishing footage.  Filming a guy leaving his house, shutting his door, walking to his car, pulling out his keys, getting in his car, driving away, sitting in traffic, arriving at his destination.  Audiences only need to see that last bit – the arrival.  Maybe, if continuity is an issue, we can see him driving away from home.  But anything more is a waste of time and the viewers’ attention.

So I’m writing this supposedly short web comic script for my sister-in-law, and I’m still fighting the expanding page-count. I’m on page eight and I’ve finally gotten to the meat of the story.

One of the problems I had was having the main character arrive outside an apartment window while the next scene requires her to be inside.  The question is – do I need to show her climbing through the window?

I decided that entering the apartment was a necessary bit of continuity to avoid confusing the reader.  But it is an unfortunate necessity, using up page space and making my artist do more work.

The trick, it turns out, is making each panel do double duty.  So while the characters are doing uninteresting things like climbing through windows, I have them thinking (hopefully) interesting and revealing things.  Thank heaven for first person narration.

An interesting reversal actually occurs here – once I decide what information to reveal during these necessary transition panels, I have to make the panels large enough to contain the new data. 

It’s like the film maker above intentionally extending the driving sequence in order to make time for an important voice-over.  But that’s no longer a mistake – it’s an intentional control over the flow of time.  The movie takes time to think because the character does.

But none of this makes my script any shorter.