Setting, Situation, Scene, Story (Part One)

There are a lot of entertainments I concoct in the idle fancies of my delirious mind. I’m a fantasy guy, no question.

Sometimes I dream a world like our own, but somewhat askew. What would the world be like, I wonder, if there were licensed, professional wizards? How would they dress? What would we hire them for? Or, I ask myself, what would the world be like after some great, unexpected transformative event? And sometimes I work on a smaller scale, my wonders to create. What would be the weirdest job office I can think of? Where the mail room staff are all clones of the same person and the receptionists are telepathic.

And sometimes I’m more amused by setting up a mystery, or a puzzle. An unmanned Mars probe finds a Charlie Brown lunch box.  A homeless man in Detroit stumbles across a corpse that is not entirely human.

And, probably because I have script-writing experience, I spin out encounters and moments of dialogue.

   ANGIE: I just what you to know… I’m madly in love with you.

   FRANK: Uh, okay. Hi, I’m Frank, by the way.

  ANGIE: Angie. Pleased to meet you.

I could spin that into a full-blow sequence of events, with humor and clever interactions. I could easily waste an afternoon on it, if I had one to spare.

The  problem, from a writer’s perspective, is that none of these things are stories. They are, in order, settings, situations, and scenes. That they all suggest stories is wonderful. They are starters, if you will, story seeds.

But your audience, be they readers or viewers or listeners, didn’t come for the tease. They didn’t come for anything less than the full show.

So next time we’ll discuss how to give it to them.

Outlines and Writing Sequence

Oh my, I haven’t really blogged much in April, have I?  I’ve been busy. Remember the Script Frenzy challenge to write 100 pages of script in April? Despite taking four days off for Norwescon and catching a killer cold, I managed to complete a stage play.

It’s a first draft. Like all first drafts, it will require review and revision. But it’s done. At 79 pages.

It was an interesting writing experience. I wrote final scene first, because I knew how it had to end. Then I wrote the first scene, because certain things had to be established for the final scene to work. Then I wrote some stuff in the middle, in no particular order. Then I wrote the scene that came before the first scene and then the scene that came after the final scene.

A lot of writers start with outlines. Obviously, I’m not one of them. But I had created such a cluster that I had to impose order on it. So, rather than outline what I needed to write, I went back and outlined what I had already written (which, incidentally, told me what I still needed to write).

What I  learned from the exercise was that my story had three distinct problems arising from the order of the scenes.

The first was sequence.  Characters cannot act on information before they receive it and problems cannot be resolved before they occur. This was the most obvious problem.

A little more subtle was the issue of timing.  In one case, I had a character told she could not return to work until she had solved a certain problem. At the start of the very next scene, she returned to work with a clever solution. It was in the right sequence, but it happened too fast. It just doesn’t seem like much of a problem when the audience only experiences five minutes of real time before it gets resolved.

And finally, there was the problem of flow – how one scene proceeds into the next.  It’s easy to cut between scenes on the stage with a blackout or a curtain, but cutting from a pair of characters on one set to the same pair of characters on the same set may not flow as well as other transitions.

This is part of the fun of working in different formats. All of these lessons can apply to the construction of any type of story, but they were easy to see while I was writing for the stage.

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.

The Jigsaw

Longer works – novels, movies, stage plays – are composed of multiple scenes. I suppose you could have a single long scene that included everything, but it would have to be a really good scene.

Changing scenes – that is, occasionally changing characters, locations, and points in time, keeps things interesting. It also resembles life. If we’re not in prison, most of us seek changes of surroundings, at least now and then.

The scenes add up to a story. They are like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. No one scene gives the whole of the picture, but each scene contains information necessary to complete the image. And like a puzzle, the pieces all have to be assembled in the proper order.

Where the analogy breaks down, however, is that the author not only assembles the puzzle, but also crafts each individual piece. And unlike jigsaw makers, storycrafters don’t start with a complete picture and then reduce it to components. Just the opposite, in my experience.

Imagine doing a jigsaw puzzle where, when you saw a piece was missing, it was your responsibility to make it. And each piece you make changes the final picture. And you can make them out of sequence, but they have to all fit in place when you are done. (You might have a few waste pieces left over that get thrown away because they don’t fit like you thought they would.)

If I really wanted to stretch the analogy, I could talk about how the events of the scene form the shape of the jigsaw piece while tone and theme are its colors. How the shapes lock the puzzle together while the colors work to make it pleasing.

But really, it’s enough for now just to contemplate how the story is built in our minds, one point at a time, adding up into a complete whole.

Difficulty Leaving Town

So it’s April now, and I’ve actually started writing. But I’ve run into a snag.

I’ve written my beginning, just like I expected to – the tavern, the beastmen, the McGuffin (now called the Star of Mountain’s Keeping) – only I feel I need one more scene before I can get my heroes out of the village and on the next location in my outline.

I’ve had the attack on the village and it had consequences, but I think I need just little more emotional weight behind Jon Warder’s decision to leave. Something to show he’s doing it to protect his people.

I don’t have the write the piece in order, of course – and with a page count deadline I probably won’t have the luxury in any case. But I have to remember to come back to the village for that one last scene.

Another thing on my mind: I was on an interesting panel at Norwescon this year that discussed, among other things, the standardization of Hollywood movie development. Formalized act structures and character development arcs and the things that absolutely must happen by the halfway point of the movie.

And I don’t know a lot of this stuff.

I’ve decided not to worry too much about it. I’ve written four novels and several plays. I have some idea of plot, conflict, and resolution. And all those structures, used poorly, just straitjacket your movie, turn it formulaic.

But I’m also aware that used well they are valuable tools. And as this is my first screenplay, I maybe working without a full toolbox. Well, we’ll just have to see what the results look like.

On the plus side, writing all this down has given me an idea for my missing scene...

Storytelling and Storytelling

Several years ago, I was teaching classes on storytelling (the actual performing for a live audience version, not storytelling as a hip term for writing). One of the points I kept coming back to in those classes was doing things intentionally. I was trying to convey the value of making conscious decisions about the performance. You have to stand still, walk around, or sit down, for example, so you might as well think about which one works with the performance instead of just doing one at random.

So, moving to the other form of storytelling -- crafting the written word to tell a tale to readers -- is the advice still good? Well, yes and no. The difference here is that the work is done before the audience sees it, which gives you a luxury that live performance does not. When the manuscript is done, it needs to have intention and reason behind it. You need to be able to look at a given scene and know why that scene is necessary, what it adds to your plot, what it says about your characters.

But how you reach that point is up to you. Some authors write with detailed outlines. Some discover the story as they write it, finishing the work just to see how it ends. Either way, here is a bit of wisdom for you: When the words are flowing and the writing is coming easy, don't stop to analyze and edit. Get the words down on paper first.

When performing on stage, every word and every gesture is a commitment. There is no rewind button. The audience is watching and it remembers. But when you are writing, you can always go back and rewrite (or delete) later -- your audience only sees the finished product.

The desired end result is the same: You want a story that is well crafted and well presented. And the best way to reach that goal is to think about what you are doing and make the decisions that serve your story.

Note: There will be no blog entry next Thursday.

The...ahem...Sex Scene

Any element of a story - from description to character to plot -- is essentially a point of information. The job of the author is to control the flow of information to the reader. Each scene is constructed to convey important data in an interesting way. Scenes that do not are probably not helping your story any.

So, the love scene... In a very, very broad, general sense, there are two types of information to be covered here. The first is binary: do they do it? yes/no. Are the people in question, in fact, lovers? yes/no. This is essentially a character point. The second datum is how do they do it? In other words, how much detail does the reader get?

The first point, the binary one, is fairly easy and also usually fairly significant. We can clearly establish that our heroes are about to do (or have just done) the deed, with all the action taking place discretely off camera. You knock on the door and someone who doesn't live there answers, wrapped in a bed sheet.

It is also possible to be intentionally unclear on this particular point, if that's what serves the story. Easier, I think, on stage or screen, where the characters involved simply exit the scene together with nothing implied either way about what happens next. But generally, the viewers want the character point. Are they or aren't they?

The second option presents much more of a decision for the writer. How much to show? A sex scene, like any other, can convey important plot and character points. It's a great place for a character to say the wrong thing, for example, or to show the reader just how well (or poorly) aligned the desires and interests of the characters are.

But all that is just whipped topping. I said above that every scene should convey important and interesting information. Sometimes the interesting outweighs the important. So maybe your sex scene doesn't exactly advance the plot. It's a sex scene! You wouldn't pay money for a kung fu movie and not expect to see some martial arts. You wouldn't pick up a romantic comedy and be surprised that it contained kissing.

Oddly enough, in the US at least, its more acceptable to admit liking a good exciting portrayal of violence than it is to admit enjoying a depiction of sex, but you know, we're all human here. A sex scene can exist primarily for its own inherent entertainment value.

Is that something you want to do in your book? Is that something you want to do with your characters -- and will it change how the reader thinks about them? It's another line item on the list of things the author needs to think about. It's a rather long list, I'm afraid.