Crazy Stupid…Avengers?!

I’ve been told, though I never really thought about it much, that Hollywood movies typically follow a standard three act formula.  But then I noticed something odd.  The current big summer blockbusting movie, Marvel’s The Avengers shares the same plot structure as last year’s romantic comedy Crazy Stupid Love.  (I’m married, I see the occasional romantic comedy.  Also, yes, that is the full title of the Avengers movie.  Probably to keep people from looking for Emma Peel.)

In act one, an event occurs.  The protagonists were happy, or at least complacent, doing whatever they normally do in their day-to-day lives – taking their wives out to dinner, solving the energy crisis, interrogating arms dealers, whatever.  But the event changes everything, tilts the world off its comfortable center, and at first no one knows how to respond.  The Avengers starts with action, gunfire, and very expensive special effects.  In Crazy Stupid Love, the catalytic event is a simple sentence: “I want a divorce.”

In act two, the characters get off to a rocky start dealing with whatever has shaken their world.  In the RomCom, Cal, played by Steve Carell, tries to reinvent himself as a swinging single guy.  In a nice counterpoint, the guy who coaches Cal on being single gets caught off guard by a potential long-term relationship and has to reinvent himself to deal with that.  In The Avengers, the heroes are called together but fail to reach their potential as a team. 

The important thing about act two is that the world has changed but the characters haven’t caught up.  Cal still has the mindset of a married man.  The would-be Avengers are still used to functioning as individuals.  As act two draws to a close, things get worse.  Cal’s early dating mistakes come back to haunt him and the super-heroes almost tear themselves apart with only the smallest effort on the part of the villains.

Act three turns it all around.  I don’t want to spoil either movie any more than I already have, but let me say this:  Act three is when the characters decide what they really value, who they really want to be, and what they are willing to do about it.  Armed with this newfound purpose, they go out and face the adversity created in act one.  Only this time, the audience knows that they have at least the potential to triumph.  Instead of feeling sorry for them or shaking our heads, now we are rooting for them.

There is also an epilogue, a dénouement, a bit at the end, which affirms the protagonist’s new position in the world and underscores his (or their) triumph.  Cal gives a graduation speech.  The Avengers get news coverage.

So a couple of points for all you writers out there.  First, I’m not accusing either film of being trite or formulaic.  The fact is, each movie is a fine example of its genre.  What is interesting is that the formula is genre independent.  It isn’t the only formula, or the only way to tell a tale, but give it its due – it works. 

And there’s nothing wrong with that.  There is a temptation to recoil at the concept of formula.  Formula, you might think, is the opposite of originality.  But if anything, the sheer astronomical differences between my two example films should illustrate how much room for creativity the formula allows.

It is also worth noting that, if done correctly, the act three protagonist is a different (and typically a better) person than he (or they) were in act one.

And finally, because this has been a long post, consider the formula as a tool.  Can you break your plot into acts?  Can you see where your protagonist is and how he our she is changing in each act?

As an experiment, I decided to break down the last movie I saw into a few simple sentences, trying to lay bare the structure.  It looked something like this:

One:  A group of college girls decide to pursue loser boyfriends.

Two:  The girls experience disappointment and heartbreak because their boyfriends are losers.

Three:  The girls send their boyfriends soap.

Epilogue:  Life is a musical.

Perhaps I need to try a different movie…

Setting, Situation, Scene… Part Three – The Conclusion

Once, as a child, I read a very forgettable book with a memorable bit in it. I don’t remember the book at all, but I remember this: one of the child heroes (it was a kid’s book, after all) was in the middle of a Lassie movie when the call to action came. When he whined about missing the end of his movies, one of his friends pointed out that we all knew how it ended. Lassie saves the day.

Yeah, the first kid replies, but I wanted to see how.

In my previous two posts, I pulled together the elements of a story. We have an interesting setting, some character interaction, an intriguing situation, and even some nice conflict.

Will our heroes risk their jobs and possibly even their position in time and space in order to expose their employer’s dangerous experiments? And how will the odd, one-sided romance angle play out?

If you think about it, gentle reader, you probably already know the answers to those questions. I mean, it’s not like you haven’t been exposed to stories before. Of course our heroes will pursue both the dangerous truth and the romance. Wouldn’t be much of a story if they didn’t.

But, if I write it all up well, hopefully you will want to stick around to see how they reach those answers.  To be a story, to be a good and satisfying story, beguiling the reader or viewer or audience with all the fun bits isn’t enough. It’s just a start.

But the story has to resolve. To reach a conclusion. To reach a good conclusion consistent with and worthy of what has gone before. And your audience has to care enough to follow you there.

And if I knew all the secrets to making that happen I’d be rich and famous. But I tell you this: it can be done.

Setting, Situation, Scene, Story (Part Two)

Today’s entry will make more sense if you’ve read Part One, which should still be available for review. Fair warning, and all.

So we have lots of samples of settings and situations, and even the start of a scene, but no story. But these are elements used in stories – so can we make a viable story from them?

I’d start with the scene because it has a pair of characters in it. Stories always involve characters. Always. Sure, I could tell the story of Olympic National Park, and I could tell it with conflict and excitement, but only if I can make you care about the park.  Make its successes and failures important to you.  At which point, it is a character. Never said they had to be human.

Our two characters from the previous blog are Frank and Angie. They’ve only just met, but she is madly in love with him. Awkward.  I need a place (possibly more, but let’s start with one) for their scene, and ultimately their story, to take place. Looking at the various settings I proposed before, I think I’ll take the weird office with the clones in the Mail Room.

I note that the reception staff are telepathic. So if I make Angie a receptionist, it starts to explain her falling for Frank before being introduced. But I also want something else going on, so they can explore their one-sided relationship in the midst of dealing with the crisis du jour.  From my list of situations, I choose the intriguing Charlie Brown lunch box on Mars.

But that’s a mystery, not a conflict. I need something that involves the characters and impels them into action.

How’s this? The weird office – let’s call it Mad Science Inc. – found the lunch box while doing commission work for NASA, processing Mars Rover data. Unfortunately, the lunch box got there due to an illegal and dangerous time/space distortion experiment conducted by, you guessed it, Mad Science Inc.

Frank is a low pay scale data guy who notices that the info being fed to NASA has been tinkered with. He gets to discover what’s going on, become involved in a cover up, and make a moral choice whether to risk his job by blowing the whistle (or maybe risk his life – there’s some strange and scary stuff behind the doors of our Mad Science company), and he gets to do it all while being trailed by a love-sick, telepathic receptionist.

That’s better. Conflict, character, moral decisions, action. Much better. Still not a story, though. We’ve got all the pieces, we’ve started assembling the puzzle, what’s still missing?

Join us next time for part three, the conclusion.

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.

Peeves on a Leash

It startles me that, in this modern and enlightened age, I have read professionally published novels with Deus ex Machina endings. I mean, there are still editors, right?

I once heard an author at a convention say that one of the big things that gets people into trying to write professionally, for whatever medium, is when they look at something and say “I could do better than that!”

Generally, I suspect they find that writing well is harder than it looks. But at least they know which mistakes they are not going to make.

So what are your pet peeves when it comes to storytelling? What tropes drive you nuts? Me, I’m getting awfully tired of the idiot listening to loud music through headphones who fails to hear the carnage and screaming from right behind him. We’ve all seen that movie, right?

And I don’t like it when a character makes a promise and the reader knows instantly that the story will be set up to make him or her break the promise.

And the Deus ex, of course. Any contrivance so old it’s name dates back to classical antiquity should be probably be avoided.

But it’s all personal taste, isn’t it? There are some tropes that I’ve seen as often as the idiot in headphones and they still work for me every time. 

Crafting a story is  an art based on choices, on making decision after decision after decision. And consciously or not, the tricks you’ve seen before are in your head, part of your storytelling arsenal.

Use them wisely.

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.

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.

After what came before…

For today, a couple of unrelated thoughts based on my previous post.  If you need to, you can go back and read it. I’ll wait – the Internet is patient.

My first thought is that comic book format creates interesting challenges to pacing.  At the request of the person I am writing for, I’m trying to avoid too many words per panel.  I’m also trying to avoid too many panels per page.  Otherwise, you know, they get really small and cramped.

Unfortunately, the original plan also included not having too many pages of story as well.  And the way I’m working now, it takes five pages to move the story an inch.  I suppose economy of storytelling is an issue in any media.  Brevity, wit.  It’s a fun, but occasionally frustrating challenge.

My other thought was about the classification and demystification of magic that I ranted about in my previous post.  Particularly as it pertains to my work-not-so-much-in-progress, The Illusionist’s House. 

I’m thinking the solution may be to go ahead and let the people in the story try to classify magic.  Maybe even let them think they’ve succeeded.  And then have them be wrong.  Let them learn that some things defy pigeonholes.

The limits of what can be known is becoming a theme for the story anyway.

At the Alpha and Omega

One of the things I’ve learned performing as a live storyteller is to always have strong first and last lines.  The first line says, hey there, pay attention, this is something worth listening to.  The last line gives a final impression and signals the close of the piece.

It’s true in writing, as well.  Of course, novelists can afford to think in terms of strong first paragraphs, but the principle is the same.  And frankly, a strong first sentence is still even better. Picture your reader in a bookstore, trying to decide if this is something worth reading.  The sooner the hook catches them, the better.

So what’s a good opening? There is no definitive answer. I would suggest that is should promise something more. Whether it introduces an interesting situation, a character, or even a tone of voice, it should suggest that things only get more interesting from here.

As an aside, the I think the most daring thing I ever sent to a publisher was the first line of my second novel: “Welcome to my great unpublished manuscript.” I mean, think of it from the point of view of the publisher.  Fortunately, it was not an unsolicited submission.

Endings are another kettle of fish. I like my ending to leave a lasting impression. Once again, it goes back to my live performance experience. People don’t remember all the words of the story, only the gist of it. But they are likely to remember the end, and the feelings it created. It would be interesting to study just the first and last lines of books – I suspect that not all authors share my approach.

To break in my new netbook, I wrote a short radio play for two voices entitled The Case of the Girl who Lost Everything. It, like this blog, was written entirely on the bus going to and from work.  The first line is, “They say there are a million stories in the naked city, so stop me if you’ve heard this one.”

And it ends, like this blog, with the line, “I stayed at the ruin that was her house, gazing longingly up at the stars.”

Making Dinner Before Breakfast

I don’t usually cook first thing in the morning. Today, however, that’s exactly what I did. When you plan to run the crock pot for eight hours, well, I guess it’s an early start or a late dinner.

I’m an okay cook if I have a recipe. I can follow a formula. Today, however, I’m experimenting with some spices a friend suggested. These little deviations from the book usually lead to my biggest successes in the kitchen. And my biggest failures.

The best cooks, of course, are those that have done this for years and know why things are on the recipe and how changing the recipe will work and what changes to avoid. But you don’t get there by being afraid to experiment.

Now, gentle reader, I assume you are not an idiot and that you have already gotten the metaphor. I’ve spent several of the last posts discussing structures and formulae. I wanted to take a moment to remind us all that writing strictly by formula is often passable but generally falls short of genius.

If you know the formula/structure/recipe when you start, you have an advantage. But becoming a better writer, like becoming a better cook (or a better anything, really) requires a type of learning and discovery that only comes from practice.

Take risks, experiment, get advice from people you trust, and have fun with it. Throw your failures in the recycle bin. If you keep at it, people will remember your successes.

Story and Structure, Part Three

‘Cause there had to be three, right? Powerful number, three.

I had a few more thoughts about the Rule of Three since my last post. One obvious and easy-to-use pattern is to have the first two things be not quite what is needed. This is too hard, this is too soft. The third, as Goldilocks will tell you, is just right.

Three is also the minimum number you can have to establish a group and an outsider. How many fairy tale princes have two older brothers? And poor Cinderella, with her two wicked step-sisters.

I’d like to wrap this series up by swinging back around to story structure. Let’s see if I can do it in three parts.

ONE: Introduce, at a minimum, a character and a goal to be achieved or a problem to overcome. Even better if you can provide a setting as well.  Little Red needs to get to Granny’s house, but the path leads through the dark and dangerous woods.

TWO: The conflict must be dealt with. The woods must be entered. This is a good place to insert the Rule of Three. The soldier on the road is given a magic bag, a seeing glass, and a violin, each of which will be necessary to escape the ogre.

THREE: Resolve the conflict. Using the Rule of Three keeps the resolution from being too simple (and hopefully from being too complex as well). After dancing each night with the Prince in her three gowns – one silver like the moon, one blue as the night sky, and one gold as the sun – the Orphan Princess finds true love.

And that’s the sort of thing I thought about when I needed to craft a tale on the fly.

Story and Structure, Part Two

Once, back in the ancient days, there was a poor cobbler’s son, who wanted nothing so much in all the world as to marry the baker’s daughter and live a quiet life.

Still talking about the tricks I used in creating a satisfying story on the fly. Today I want to talk about stylistic language, the Rule of Three, and story structure.

Stylistic language is just setting and keeping a tone of voice that suits the tale. One of my personal rules when I was performing as a storyteller was never start with “Once Upon a Time.” To me, that phrase is reserved for either (a) working with very small children, or (b) making fun of fairy tales and parodying them.

So at the very beginning of the story, I had to make a decision that helped set the tone of voice. And I kept a number of stock beginning phrases available to select from.

The other interesting thing in the example above is that contains a lot of compressed information. A good rule in performing is to say what you need to say and then shut up. My intro above  introduces in one sentence a setting reference (back in ancient days/fairy tale), a hero (poor cobbler’s son,) and the goal that must be met for the story to end happily (marry the baker’s daughter). 

Important side note: The goal can change if the character grows and changes. The story can end happily if he learns that the baker’s daughter is not really for him and he marries someone else. But it’s easier to simply meet the conditions set at the beginning.

So in order to hang a story on these bare bones, the hero needs to overcome an obstacle between him and his goal.

And this is where the Rule of Three comes in. Three is a measure of complexity. One is simple and unsatisfying. So he asked for her hand in marriage and she said yes. End of story. Yawn. Two is not quite enough to clearly establish a pattern. Four is more than we need.

So the hero must do three things. Or maybe one complex thing with the help of three friends or allies. Or three kindnesses he does to strangers along the way get him the three tools he needs to succeed.

Story and Structure, Part One

I used to do this trick where I’d tell a story, totally impromptu, making it up as I go along. I’d do this performing to a live audience. The general consensus from the feedback I got is that, over time, I got fairly good at it. I haven’t tried it in years, mind, so I don’t know if I still have the knack.

But I’ve been thinking recently about how I did it. I relied on a number of tricks – stylistic language, the rule of three, creative repetition, and a basic, even formulaic, idea of story structure.

I’m going to start with that last one first, because it is actually the most important one for writing. The others are mostly embellishments, so we’ll get to them later.

Usually, in impromptu work, the performer is given a topic or challenge. This does two things: first, it keeps the performer from just telling some already memorized work and second, it gives the performer a starting point. I tended to work from three things, often a character, a place, and an item, which I asked the audience to provide.

So, basic story structure: We start with a hero (character) in an established situation (place) who has something that he or she needs to do (perhaps acquiring or delivering an item). The necessary conflict is generated when doing the necessary thing doesn’t turn out to be easy.

The story is resolved when the hero succeeds. How satisfying the story is depends on how cleverly and how easily the character succeeds.

And that’s where the rule of three comes in, which I’ll explain next time.

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...