Editor’s note: “Some Assembly Required” was written and scheduled to post prior to COVID-19’s formal classification as a global pandemic and the ensuing social disruption it has caused here in the United States and around the world; in light of that, a thesis about storytelling craft seems to me somewhat inconsequential and irrelevant.
More broadly, however, the essay makes a case for slowing down, something we’re all doing out of admittedly unwelcome necessity at present, and learning to value the intellectual dividends of thoughtful rumination over the emotional gratification of kneejerk reaction; as such, I submit “Some Assembly Required” as planned—along with my best wishes to all for steadfast health and spirits through this crisis.
Castle Grayskull. The Cobra Terror Drome. The Batcave. I didn’t have every 1980s action-figure playset, but, man, how I cherished the ones I got. In those days of innocence, there was no visceral thrill quite like waking up to an oversized box under the Christmas tree, tearing off the wrapping to find this:
Or this:
Or this:
Oh, the possibilities! Getting one of those glorious playsets was like being handed the keys to a magical kingdom of one’s very own. After having been inspired by the adventures of G.I. Joe and the Transformers and the Ghostbusters at the movies, on their cartoon series, and in comics, now you had your very own “backlot” to stage your personal daydreams. It was grand.
I am in no way indulging 1980s nostalgia here—surely you know me better than that by now. Rather, I mean only to elicit the particular thrum of excitement the era’s playsets aroused, the imagination they unleashed. It’s fair to say I became addicted to that sensation in my youth; even at midlife, I still need my fix. Nowadays, though, I get it not through curated collections of overpriced memorabilia—retro-reproductions of the action figures of yore—but rather the surcharge-free creation of my own fiction.
CREATIVITY—ONE… TWO… THREE!
Getting a new playset as a kid and a starting a new writing project as an adult share arguably the same three developmental phases. The first is what I call Think about What You Might like for Christmas. This is the stage when you experiment noncommittally with ideas, get a sense of what excites you, what takes hold of your imagination—maybe talk it over with friends—and then envision what it will look like. Selling yourself on a new story idea, deciding it’s worth the intensive time and energy required to bring it to fruition, is much the same as furnishing your parents with a carefully considered wish list: You’re cashing in your biannual Golden Ticket on this. It’s a period of escalating anticipation, and of promise. The “thing” isn’t real yet—it’s still a nebulous notion, not a tangible commodity—but it will be…
Stage two is Some Assembly Required: This is the recognition that your personal paracosm doesn’t come ready-to-play out of the box. You’ll need to snap the pieces in place, apply the decals; you need to give the forum structure first. To use another analogy: You don’t start decorating a Christmas tree that’s been arranged askance in its stand. (More on Some Assembly Required in a minute.)
Stage three: It’s Playtime! You’ve done the hard, preparatory work of building your imaginary realm, and now you get to experience the pure joy of writing—to have fun, in other words, with your new toys.
THE ELEMENTS OF STORY
Some Assembly Required is a make-or-break stage for a story. Do you have the patience to follow the instructions, step by step, or will you wing it to get to Playtime? The former types of writers are often referred to as planners (or plotters), the latter pantsers. And while there’s no “correct” way to be creative—other than the one that allows for repeatable results—it behooves scribes to spend some time “reading the instructions,” as it were, before diving in headlong.
The exercise can even be a joyous one in its own right. I can’t imagine there’s any record of applied narrative craft—of Some Assembly Required—more fascinating, inspiring, and insightful than the Raiders of the Lost Ark story-conference document, a scanned, 126-page typewritten transcript of a weeklong creative summit—dated January 23–27, 1978—in which George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, and screenwriter Lawrence Kasdan took a vaguely sketched character (whom Lucas refers to as “Indiana Smith”) and a bunch of Republic serial–inspired set pieces (Spielberg: “There is a sixty-five foot boulder that’s form-fitted to only roll down the corridor coming right at him”), and broke the back of the story. As an X-ray into the alchemical artistic process, the transcript a cultural artifact as valuable as anything Indy himself ever recovered; it should be required reading for any student of storytelling.
To be clear: Some Assembly Required is about so much more than merely plotting; it’s about formulating the story, of which plot is but a single (albeit crucial) component.
It’s at this point you start with a logline: a compelling single-sentence summary that conveys the protagonist, antagonist, conflict/stakes, setting, and tone. The logline is the conceptual nucleus of your story, around which all the “particles”—characters, dialogue, scenes, subplots, themes—organize. If you can’t make the story work as a logline—an “elevator pitch,” as it’s also known—it won’t work as a full-length narrative. Any problematic elements in the logline will only be amplified, and that much harder to adequately address, in the screenplay or manuscript.
With your logline locked down, you identify your genre, and look to cinematic and/or literary antecedents as narrative models. Late screenwriting guru Blake Snyder offered a codified system for doing so in his book Save the Cat! Goes to the Movies—he identified ten story models that adhere to the monomythic arc—though his successors have abused the tool by habitually misapplying and misteaching it (1917 is unambiguously Golden Fleece, not, as they erroneously assert, Dude with a Problem), so stick to the three books Snyder himself wrote and avoid the STC! blog and posthumous spin-off manuals, like Save the Cat! Writes a Novel and Save the Cat! Goes to the Indies. Once you determine the type of story you’re telling—Monster in the House, Out of the Bottle, Buddy Love, what have you—it’s indispensably edifying to study half a dozen produced/published exemplars.
After that, I like to figure out all my major characters—their traits and arcs—and identify the theme of the narrative; that stuff’s the soul of the story, and the plotting is worthless if it isn’t serving that. Who is the story about, and what are the psychological or philosophical issues the plot is forcing them to confront? If a plot isn’t catalyzing painful personal transformation—and emotional catharsis—it’s just a bunch of meaningless events or set pieces. (There are exceptions to this “rule,” of course, but not in most commercial fiction worth a damn. One must master narrative conventions, anyway, before experimenting with them.)
Then I plot. After deconstructing a few select paragons of my genre to familiarize myself with its governing conventions (because each carries its own preestablished audience expectations, to be honored or subverted, but never defied) I break down the fifteen major plot points of my own story before expanding it to approximately forty “beats,” give or take, for an average of ten per act (given that the double-sized second act is bisected at the midpoint). Each of these beats has its own little narrative arc, with a conflict that ends in an achieved or failed resolution (thereby compelling the next sequence), and a measurable value change: A scene or chapter that starts with positive charge (Indiana Jones discovers the secret chamber in which the Ark is hidden…) must conclude on a negative charge (… but the Nazis confiscate it and seal him inside without hope for escape), and vice versa.
Once I’ve got all that figured out—my logline (the conceptual lodestar of the project), my genre/subgenre (so I can observe its conventional precepts), my characters (and their transformational arcs), the thematics (the reason I’m telling the damn story), and the plot itself (which, as noted, is merely one facet of story), only then do I “go to pages,” as they say. Now I’ve got a roadmap, and it’s the security of having thought through all those elementals that gives me the freedom and confidence to take occasional detours—knowing I can always find my way back to the interstate—and to discover little inspired moments along the way.
THE UNEXAMINED TALE IS NOT WORTH TELLING
When we take our time at Some Assembly Required—when we practice the disciplines of patience and craft—we not only work through many of the narrative issues that will ultimately determine whether a given project sinks or swims creatively, we afford ourselves the intellectual and emotional luxury of living with our story for a while, of better knowing it before it’s reified.
Good short stories, good essays and good books develop over time, with time to reflect. They are not knee-jerk responses to things, but they are deeply felt and deeply thought, and that takes time. I’ve always been someone who needs time to know how he feels about things.
Bev Vincent, “An Interview with Joe Hill,” Cemetery Dance 74/75 (October 2016): 26
The tools of screenwriting—loglines, beat sheets, genre classifications—are what allow me, as a novelist, the time to reflect on what I’m about to write, so it’s ironic that Hollywood doesn’t really encourage rumination; it doesn’t have tolerance for Some Assembly Required. Rather, the methodology prescribed above is treated as nothing more than an assembly line—to produce a saleable/shootable script as quickly as possible.
Such is why Hollywood offers up a lot of formulaic movies, and, even more offensively, narratives with socially irresponsible messaging: defense contractors are celebrated as superheroes (Batman and Iron Man); criminal sociopaths earn get-out-of-jail-free sympathy for saying grace (Fast & Furious); don’t be fooled: the deep state controls everything (Scandal and The X-Files); no one quite knows you as fully—or has ever loved you as deeply—as that high-school boyfriend (and current small-town handyman) you haven’t seen since you left to make good in the big city twenty years ago (most Hallmark offerings); old white men with military-grade firepower are the last line of defense against bad hombres coming to rape and pillage (Rambo: Last Blood). Pernicious worldviews become narratively reinforced—and culturally ingrained—when writers fail to interrogate, both intellectually and ethically, the stories they’ve conceived.
About a decade ago, I wrote a spec script about a monster on the loose in an Upstate New York college town. In the years since, the concept has refused to loosen its hold on my imagination, so I recently began reworking it as a novel. In reevaluating the screenplay with fresh eyes, I couldn’t help but appreciate its technical proficiency: The logline was aces, and the plot hit every enjoined Save the Cat! beat with clockwork precision.
But it was also chock full of so many of the unconscious archetypes I’ve since come to find so vexing: an evil scientist; an inept police department; crooked and secretive officeholders; a plucky love interest that’s there to, in no particular order, provide analytical exposition, serve as the damsel-in-distress, and support the (white male) protagonist on his heroic journey. The core concept was great—I haven’t changed a word of the logline in the current iteration—but I’d cooked up the plot in an easy-bake oven so it would be ready-to-serve as quickly as possible.
So, with the novel, I saw an opportunity not merely to avoid the clichéd and dispiritingly common portrayal of unethical scientists, corrupt authorities, and conspiratorial politicians that has in its subversive way contributed to our present culture of pervasive institutional distrust, but to consciously and constructively depict interdisciplinary/interdepartmental cooperation among local elected officials, municipal services, and academic consultants as they earnestly work toward resolving an (admittedly fantastical) public-safety crisis. In doing so, I discovered there is sufficient dramatic conflict in the story’s central premise without resorting to creatively hackneyed and culturally irresponsible tropes. Who’da thunk?
THE SHAPE OF THINGS TO COME
And it isn’t merely formulaic stories writers churn out when they don’t take a disciplined approach; alternatively, it’s utterly formless fiction they produce. Case in point: the mode of spaghetti-slinging “storytelling” typified by Game of Thrones and the Star Wars sequel trilogy. By my appraisal, none of the guiding creative hands on either those projects had the patience or the vision to consider (even perfunctorily) what overall shape those narratives might take, what the arcs of the major characters were, or what the point of any of it was—what those stories were about. The result, in both instances, was an amorphous, overlong, meaningless exercise in stuff happening regardless of whether it made sense, whether actions were consistent and logical, or whether any of it amounted to anything of consequence—whether those stories had something to say about the human condition, about the world at large.
Conspicuously, the writers were playing in toyboxes they didn’t themselves create, so they skipped right over Think about What You Might like for Christmas and Some Assembly Required, and it shows in the scripts they produced. Note how when predetermined production deadlines—not any deliberate story design—demanded both sprawling, make-it-up-as-you-go epics reach a climax, the penultimate installment of Game of Thrones and concluding episode of the so-called “Skywalker saga” desperately invoked a new permutation of perhaps the oldest and laziest narrative device: When Daenerys—suddenly and needlessly—reduced King’s Landing to cinders, when the Emperor—inexplicably and illogically—returned from the dead as the Big Bad All Along!, some of the highest-paid, Emmy-awarded screenwriters in Hollywood resorted to what can only be termed diablo ex machina. Ask yourself: Was I satisfied?
Think about What You Might like for Christmas and It’s Playtime, in their own ways, directly engage our imagination; that’s seductive, and intoxicating. Some Assembly Required, on the other hand, activates our intellect, and demands a certain degree of sobriety; it calls for deeper, more nuanced comprehension of the world over which we’re about to preside: the structure it assumes, the themes it explores, the values it espouses. Without it, creativity often veers toward formula or formlessness, toward bad messaging or no messaging.
Former UCLA Screenwriting Chair Richard Walter is known to say that writers get to “traffic in their own daydreams.” A lovely truism—one that is both a privilege and responsibility. There are more stories than ever, yet precious few told with disciplined artistry or ethical scrutiny. “Reading through the instructions” compels us to slow down, to reflect, to temper our visceral enthusiasm with measured consideration.
Some Assembly Required is the moment when we at long last open that elusive box of wonders, when the stuff of dreams magically materializes into tactility—modeling clay for our imaginations! Like Christmas itself, those sacramental occasions recur with precious infrequency, so drink them in deeply and trust the next phase will come in due time—inevitably and only too soon.
Thank you for yet another well-thought out post. Your disclaimer in the beginning, though thoughtful and heartfelt, I don’t think is necessary. In these challenging times, it’s actually a breath of fresh air to step away from the emotional turmoil and allow ourselves a chance to heal and find peace. Thank you for taking us on a creative journey and reminding us that storytelling is and always will be a needed part of human existence.
I agree
All doom and gloom all the time takes its toll. I NEED to “step away”, to “heal and find peace now and again”
So I echo Stacey Wilk here
Thank you
It’s probably fair to say — and I don’t pretend to possess greater insight into the challenges we face than anyone — that we are in for some dark days ahead. I don’t think we’re looking at a timeline of social disruption that’s going to last four or eight or even twelve weeks; I suspect 2020 is going to take a very different shape than the one we’d assumed (and that was even taking the upcoming gladiatorial election into account). To that end, we are going to need to step back from constant coronavirus coverage and try to find ways to reconnect to some sense of joy, to “normal life.” And we’re going to have to find a way to do it without pubs, without new movies or television (productions have all been shuttered and Christ only knows when they’ll resume), without sports (I don’t see my Dodgers ever taking the field this season), without barbecues and backyard gatherings as the weather warms. This is going to be a hell of a test of our resilience.
But… we could very likely emerge an entirely new culture in exchange for our endurance. The moribund mythologies of the 20th century we’ve been mired in — from the exponential growth fantasies of neoliberal capitalism to the superhero fiction of the 1940s that inspires our religious devotion — might finally be consigned to the history books as a new way of looking at the world asserts its prominence. Maybe it’s time to let the old ways die, right? Perhaps this is what it takes to compel change: a dramatic reset button? Perhaps it will be COVID-19, and not 9/11 in the end, that gives the 2000s a true cultural identity of its own?
And here I am indulging the very get-it-while-it’s-hot speculation I just argued against! Perhaps I’ll just repurpose this blog as an online book club?! Just so long as we don’t read anything by Robin Cook…
Thank you, Stacey. Waking up to the welcome reception this piece has already received — and you were the first to comment! — heartens me. Like everyone, I feel knocked sideways by the speed and scale at which our everyday life has turned upside-down so pervasively and ubiquitously. Furthermore, I feel as though every subject about which I have something to say applies to a world that vanished overnight, and will probably never return exactly as it once was — for better or worse.
For that reason, it’s probably all the more important for writers — those upon whom we depend “for orientation and pattern recognition” — to slow down and not rush to contextualize the coronavirus politically, historically, socioeconomically, or otherwise. Earlier this week, author Sloane Crosley published an essay called “Someday, We’ll Look Back on All of This and Write a Novel” in which she suggests “it’s best to let tragedy cool before gulping it down and spitting it back into everyone’s faces. After all, ‘Don Quixote’ was published about a century into the Spanish Inquisition. Art should be given a metaphorical berth as wide as the literal one we’re giving one another. . . .
“We all know how limited this kind of get-it-while-it’s-hot writing will seem in the future. That’s never stopped us from doing it. It’s not stopping me from indulging in a version of it right now. Look at the narratives that came out in the years immediately following 9/11. They have not aged well. Really, we’re only just now nailing World War I. But like everyone else, writers feel the need to distill life as a means of surviving it.”
So, for that reason, I’m going to continue drafting my aforementioned horror story about the public-safety crisis in Upstate New York — which seems oddly relevant, actually — and trust that any topicality reflected in the text is purely a subconscious manifestation, done without didactic agenda. Because I don’t know what to say about COVID-19 except “I don’t know what to say about this.”
Well, I have one other thing to say about it: Stay healthy throughout this crisis — and stay in touch. I wanna know when my friends are doing okay… and when they’re not — because we are all in this together.
As you said, for many writers their first thought is likely to be cliche
Oddly enough, this is where a formula, even an arbitrary formula, can improve your work
In Star Trek TOS they needed info from a man who had been brain-fried. Spock was going to hypnotize him to get at his subconscious. Standards & Practices said no, unless Spock was shown to have had a medical degree AND the hypnosis could be done w/out hypnotizing the viewer
So instead they came w/ the Vulcan mind-meld, specifically stated not to be hypnosis
In traditional poetry, the rhyme scheme and scansion FORCE the poet to consider every. Single. Word
In fact, in my article for your site, The Cat in the Sprawl: Blake Snyder’s Genres and Postnarrative Fiction, I’d originally started w/ a complicated metaphor involving levels. You suggested, though did not insist, I simplify it. I did, and the result was much better, including a better title
Some writers cut an arbitrary 10% from their writing. While this does help reduce prolixity, it also, again, forces the writer to consider each aspect, to decide what is truly necessary
Strong characterization can also do that. You want your characters to split up. The characters are smart and genre-savvy. Now you actually have to consider why they’d split up. Preferably something still in character and not ridiculous (again, maybe don’t go w/ your first thought). Or perhaps you avoid the “splitting up” cliche altogether
Now, I am STRONGLY anti-censorship. And I understand that arbitrary rules can do more harm than good. For instance, “Make sure you show that the monster is still alive at the end for the sequel!” You and I eviscerated this rule at length in the comments of “Monster Mash: When It’s Too Long at the Party”. And the notes Jon Peters gave to Kevin Smith for their never-to-be-realized Superman movie were just plain silly. Watch the video sometime. If you encountered the same sort of executives in your time in Hollywood, then I fully understand your gripes and your decision to leave
But anything that makes you reconsider your first thought will most likely improve the end-product
Yeah, necessity is the mother of invention, isn’t it? The mother of creativity! I didn’t realize that about the Vulcan mind meld — I never knew that — but it makes perfect sense. So much of the science fiction of that era — from Star Trek to The Twilight Zone — was about finding clever creative allegories for sociopolitical issues that were too sensitive to discuss openly on network television. We owe those series — and the visions of writers like Serling and Roddenberry (and their staffs) — a profound cultural debt.
And sometimes restrictions aren’t even censorial in nature but rather budgetary. (Roddenberry came up with the transporter beam because he didn’t have the money to show the Enterprise landing on a new alien world each week.) The original ending of Back to the Future, per Zemeckis’ DVD audio commentary, had Marty going home in a lead-lined refrigerator, which required the power of an atomic blast at the Nevada nuclear site. (I wonder if this was consciously appropriated for Kingdom of the Crystal Skull or just a coincidence?) Anyway, when that proved to be too costly and logistically complicated, the script was rewritten so that the time machine was now an automobile, and the “energy surge” it required to go back to the future was a lightning bolt that strikes the clocktower in town square. Zemeckis acknowledged that the solution was not only more cost-effective and logistically feasible (all shot on the Universal backlot), but that it kept the town of Hill Valley itself as one of the story’s main characters; furthermore, the courthouse not only gave the story a literal ticking clock, but echoed the movie’s temporal motif in a way the atomic testing grounds didn’t at all. So, it was a win-win: the production was less expensive and more manageable, the script richer and more suspenseful.
Now contrast that with Game of Thrones, in which Benioff and Weiss were under zero restrictions: Bloodletting? Nudity? Incest? Rape? “Go to town,” HBO said — “here’s a blank check!” They could do anything they wanted — and they did — but to what end?
Or how ’bout the Fetch Quest of Return of the Skywalker? We tend to think of the Star Wars and Indiana Jones movies as being globe-hopping adventures — and they are — but not nearly so much as we remember. Most of the first half of A New Hope takes place on Tatooine, and the Bad Guys Close In section on the Death Star; interstitially, there are a lot of scenes on spaceships. (Same goes for the sequels.) Raiders starts in the jungle, transitions briefly to Princeton, and then we spend the rest of the movie in and around Cairo. (Ditto Temple of Doom, which starts in Shanghai, transitions to the jungle for a bit, and then places us in the titular temple for the rest of the film.)
What Spielberg and Lucas did was shoot on exotic locations we hadn’t really seen on film before, and then made the most of those locations, moving the plot and characters around within those worlds. (Consider, for instance, how much time is spent on Dagobah listening to Yoda philosophize in Empire, or the gorgeously choreographed cat-and-mouse intrigue on the streets and in the bars and back alleys of Cairo in Raiders?)
But J.J. Abrams could conjure any alien landscape he wanted with the magic of CGI, so he kept whisking us from one location to the next in an Are you entertained yet? frenzy of constant motion. He distracts you from the fact he has nothing of consequence to say by constantly changing up the setting in lightspeed pursuit of who-know-what-now. (Spielberg and Lucas, in fairness, also got lazy on Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, shooting not on location as they previously had but rather on CGI-augmented soundstages in Hollywood, and the movie suffered badly for it.)
Restrictions can be frustrating — I get that — but they can also be an artist’s best friend. They are catalysts of creativity. Novelists don’t have to contend with studio notes or budgetary considerations, which is why it’s all the more imperative authors challenge themselves to master the principles of narrativity, to understand that they’re there to facilitate creativity, not retard it. Shakespeare, after all, had to honor the conventions of drama and of verse, and he managed to produce a lasting work or two…
P.S. Jon Peters was a hairdresser that networked his way into producing major motion pictures (which really tells you all you need to know about Hollywood and the lion’s share of those who make movies). That motherfucker has no business telling anyone how to write so much as a Christmas card!
Terry Rossio wrote a column at wordplayer.com. Lots of good advice. Some applicable only to movies, some to any form of writing
Number 36 (We’re Not Worthy). He discusses many of the people he met in Hollywood. All brilliant, talented, thoughtful, all able to impart valuable lessons…
W/ one exception:
>JON PETERS: At the opposite end of the scale is Jon Peters. He’s the exception we mentioned earlier. Ted and I rarely speak ill of anyone… but… how this man continues to find work in this business escapes me. Working on Neil Gaiman’s SANDMAN project, we started our pitch with the following: “So Burgess casts a spell, trying to capture the personification of DEATH — but instead, gets the personification of DREAM (the Sandman) instead!” Peters didn’t get it — how could Death be a person? — and we spent almost half an hour on just that sentence. The next half hour was spent with him telling us the opening seance should be people playing with a Ouija board. It was, as they say in the business, simply a dick-measuring contest. And it turns out, yes, Peters was the biggest dick.
Wordplay is an invaluable writer’s resource, Dell — thanks for mentioning it here. I’ve read through all the articles, but it was hard to get a sense of whether they were still posting new material, so I admit to falling out of touch with that site for a while. I’ll be better about checking in on it once a month…
Rossio and Elliott are the real deal: These are scribes who know how to break a story — on a deadline, no less. For my money, they’re the best commercial screenwriters of their generation: Aladdin. The Mask of Zorro. Shrek. Pirates of the Caribbean. National Treasure. Here you have screenwriters who know how to take a killer concept, plot it to perfection, and their stories always feature rich characterization and thematic depth.
I mean, I could teach a class on the character work in Zorro alone. Years ago, I did a series of posts on this blog in which I deconstructed Jack Bauer, Frank Underwood, John Rambo, the Joker, and even “Stephen Colbert” (the archconservative persona he adopted for The Colbert Report), and I demonstrated how each could be boiled down to five consistent and identifiable traits. Let’s look at Alejandro Murietta (Antonio Banderas); Alejandro is:
1. Sly and nimble at banditry
2. Passionate
3. Grieving (the murder of his brother)
4. Vengeful
5. Reckless
Now, go watch Zorro and take note of how every word Alejandro utters and every action he takes conforms at all times to one (or more) of those characteristics. Grieving is his “fatal flaw” — the psychic wound he will need to overcome through the course of his transformational arc. Vengeful and Reckless are what my old mentor Dave Freeman call “super defense mechanisms”; that is, they’re not congenital personality attributes, but rather emotional defense mechanisms (used to hide the “fatal flaw” from plain sight) that are so prevalent, they serve as de facto traits. And every time Alejandro is made to confront either his “fatal flaw” or his defense mechanisms, he’s being pushed through his character arc.
When Diego offers to teach him to take his revenge and live to celebrate it? That’s a transformational shove to Vengeful. When Diego calls him a “thief and pitiful clown,” that’s a shove against Reckless. When Alejandro says, “Sir, I miss my brother” and Diego barks “YOUR BROTHER IS DEAD,” that’s a direct hit to the fatal flaw itself. Zorro is full of that kind of under-the-radar writing. And that’s why it’s so satisfying to see Alejandro push through his arc and become a disciplined servant of the people in the end. Great screenwriting. That’s how it’s done, baby!
Pirates of the Caribbean gets shit on a lot — particularly by Hollywood folk — but those movies are master classes in concept, plotting, and characterization. (There’s a reason Johnny Depp scored an Oscar nod for Jack Sparrow, and why he’s reprised the role so many times.) The Curse of the Black Pearl is a bounty of creativity (plot- and character-wise), especially for a movie based on a theme-park attraction; Rossio and Elliott were then handed the challenge of taking what was essentially a closed-ended, standalone adventure (much like Back to the Future, The Matrix, and even A New Hope before it) and reverse-engineering a trilogy — and I absolutely think they rose to the occasion. People say those movies make no sense, but there is very much a coherent plot that runs across that trilogy, which is more than I can say about Game of Thrones and its umpteen unresolved plotlines.
Stung by the criticism Dead Man’s Chest and At World’s End took for being over-plotted and hard to follow, On Stranger Tides is a much more straightforward Golden Fleece adventure à la Indiana Jones, without all the double-dealing and competing agendas that made the first three so much fun to watch. Still, as a postscript to the Pirates trilogy, I think it mostly works; it’s a self-contained episode that picks up on an unresolved plot thread from At World’s End, so it was a logical place to take the franchise after resolving the storyline that carried the trilogy.
Dead Men Tell No Tales — which, notably, Rossio and Elliott didn’t write — was where we saw the series start to run out of ideas, out of inspiration, and a lot of the backstory we learn about Jack and his magic compass directly contradicts information established in the earlier movies. For me — and I’m a huge fan of this franchise — Dead Men Tell No Tales was the point when Pirates became too much of a good thing. But I love the first four unapologetically, and there are a lot of screenwriting/storytelling lessons to be learned from them. Fortunately for us, Rossio has distilled so much of that wisdom in the fifty-nine wonderful articles he’s published on Wordplay.
Landon Porter (Vaal), the guy who wrote about Post-Apocalyptic Non-Dystopia I referenced in Changing the Narrative (https://www.seanpcarlin.com/narrative-propaganda/) wrote a few articles about rules in fiction
Playing by the Rules (After Making Them Up) Part 1 (http://www.descendantsserial.paradoxomni.net/playing-by-the-rules-after-making-them-up-part-1/)
Making the Rules Part 2: A Little Bit of Magic (http://www.descendantsserial.paradoxomni.net/making-the-rules-part-2-a-little-bit-of-magic/)
Making the Rules Part 3: To Thine Own Characters Be True (http://www.descendantsserial.paradoxomni.net/making-the-rules-part-3-to-thine-own-characters-be-true/)
Making the Rules Part 4: Breaking the Rules (http://www.descendantsserial.paradoxomni.net/making-the-rules-part-4-breaking-the-rules/)
This is a fabulous series of articles, Dell; thank you for bringing them to the blog’s attention. You routinely alert me to or remind me of a great resource, be it Twilight of the Superheroes or “Batman in the Operating Room” and now this.
“Playing by the Rules (After Making Them Up)” is a great argument in support of the thesis of this post. I hate when someone says it better than I did!
“A Little Bit of Magic” should be required reading for anyone trying to better understand the principle of Double Mumbo Jumbo. My personal preference, with my own fiction, is to keep the “magic” (as Vaal defines it) limited to a single instance and/or catalyst from which every other “magical” occurrence springs. So, in my recently completed Out of the Bottle novella Spex, two boys come into a possession of a pair of purposefully enchanted “X-ray specs.” The glasses then give them X-ray vision, but the parameters of the “superpower” are clearly established (for both the characters and the audience), and the “spell” can definitely be broken. So, as Vaal says in the first article, set the rules but play by them. I personally find that “worldbuilding” has a way of getting away from a writer, but there are those — like Brandon Sanderson — who are exceptionally disciplined at it.
But whether you go for “single-instance magic” or “systemic magic,” Vaal is right: codification is key. The problem nowadays is that too many content creators take an anything-goes approach to speculative fiction that results in series that are slick but meaningless, that are full of magic but devoid of suspense (Penny Dreadful is a notable example, though I have not yet seen City of Angels). When nothing is codified, there’s no tension, because anything can happen at any time. Richard Donner’s Superman: The Movie established parameters to his powers, but Richard Lester’s Superman II turned him into Mary Poppins, capable of teleportation and “magical kisses” and all manner of on-the-fly abilities that came and went at the whim of the filmmakers.
Which leads us into “To Thine Own Characters Be True”: Just like magical systems, characters must be codified, too. You establish a finite set of behavioral parameters — of personality traits — and then everything they say and do must conform at all times to one or more of those traits. In my two-part series “Who’s Laughing Now?”, I demonstrated how the Jack Nicholson and Heath Ledger interpretations of the Joker are 60% similar: They share three traits in common, but have two traits apiece that are unique to those particular iterations. When I create characters, I think long and hard about what their four or five traits are — how I can create a mix that is consistent, unique, and offers me the most creative possibilities. Characterization — and character arcs — are probably the least understood element of storytelling, even by seasoned writers.
I could write an essay-long reaction to “Breaking the Rules,” so let me try to hit a few key points. Serialized stories start to break their own rules (in a bad way) when one of the following happens:
– They never had a consistent or well-defined system of “magic” to begin with (Penny Dreadful).
– They’ve gone on so long and consequently exploited every conceivable permutation of their central premise that the writers resort to acts of increasing narrative desperation (Smallville).
– They’ve become so unmanageably expansive that they’re riddled with irreconcilable continuity inconsistencies (this is true of the mega-franchise model of Marvel and DC Comics, but also long-running multimedia brands like Star Wars and Star Trek, all of which these days over-rely on the “multiverse” or “alternate timeline” workarounds, an editorial cheat if ever there was one).
– The whole narrative (or “myth arc”) was a house of cards to begin with, which is absolutely the case with both Lost and The X-Files. On both of those series, they created overarching mysteries SO BIG there simply was no satisfying resolution to them, even presuming the creators had specific conclusions in mind when they started (to be clear: they didn’t). And there’s nothing wrong with subjecting your audience to ambiguity (I wish more stories would condition us to be comfortable with it, the way the X-Files monster-of-the-week eps seldom if ever reached a conclusive resolution), but the corner those shows painted themselves into was promising All Will Be Revealed! and then inevitably failing to deliver on that. Shows like these aren’t victims of failed writing so much as failed promises, which they never should’ve made in the first place.
For me, the genre master’s class in setting the rules, playing by them, and then breaking them to memorable effect is Wes Craven‘s Scream. Craven and screenwriter Kevin Williamson establish the rules (no drinking/drugs, no sex, don’t ever say “I’ll be right back”), then systematically punish anyone who transgresses them — all the while deeply emotionally investing us in the heroine (Sidney Prescott). So, when Sidney has sex in the third act, we’re now shitting our pants because we know she has to die — those are the rules. In the final moments of the film, though, Sidney decides she won’t be the victim of someone else’s game (“Not in my movie” she says when the killer attempts to come back to life for one final scare), at which point she experiences profound emotional catharsis: Sidney come to terms with the fact that her mother’s promiscuity didn’t make the woman deserving of murder. That’s how you do it, baby!
But that not only takes command of craft, it requires that you have something to say about the world with your stories, and these days most commercial entertainments are more concerned with self-commenting on their own sprawling “shared universes” than illuminating some truth about our actual shared universe, something I’ll be discussing a bit more (from a new angle) in my May 2020 post…
Thanks for always elevating the conversation around here, Dell!
Nice juxtaposition with ‘some assembly required’–that rings true with my stories.
I have to say, my first thought at that title–‘some assembly required’–was the directive against ‘assembly’ in most of the US, especially among oldsters. I worry that for us, some assembly is required and living isolated is unhealthy. But that’s in the long run. First we have to get through the short run.
You know, Jacqui, as fate would have it, I purposefully placed myself in a state of self-imposed exile — of creative isolation — all winter long in order to break the back of my new novel: I abstained from alcohol between New Year’s and St. Patrick’s Day — which meant limited socializing — and even restricted the extent of my climate activism in order to sit at my desk for the last three months doing my Some Assembly Required due diligence on my WIP!
And through all of that, I can only tell you how I dreamt of nothing more than meeting up with my friends for St. Paddy’s and sharing a laugh and a pint (correction: many laughs and many pints). So, it was a crushing personal disappointment to realize that that wasn’t going to happen — not now, not next month, not for the foreseeable future. But for the short-term, it’s the socially responsible thing to do. We’re in uncharted waters here, at least as far as living memory goes, and sacrifices — the kind to which we are not accustomed — will be required. But skipping the pub is hardly comparable to shipping out to the front, so I’m not sitting around crying about it.
Our WordPress community has certainly taken on heightened importance to me in this period of social distancing, so it means the world you stopped by this morning to read this post and comment on it. I’ll be frequenting your blog, as well, grateful for the opportunity to congregate, as it were, with friends and fellow scribes. Stay and healthy and productive in the weeks to come…
I like reading about your process, Sean. I’m glad you aren’t leaning toward “an amorphous, overlong, meaningless exercise in stuff happening.” Lol. That line cracked me up. I think it’s more a problem with films these days, but I’ve read a number of books where the story feels like a pointless ramble. I’m also tired of predictable tropes and been-there-done-that characters. It’s one of the reasons I have such a hard time reading romances. Goodness their repetitive.
This is a good time to write, I think, as we’re all hunkered down, and trying to find a good balance to all the horrible news. I do feel like I’m living in a sci-fi movie, and I don’t like it. Stay creative and stay safe as this virus plays out. Take care.
Thanks, Diana! When I wrote that post on loglines exactly three years ago, I’d titled it “Foundations of Storytelling, Part 1: The Logline”… only I never wrote Part 2! I was going to do a series in which I discussed the stages of my creative process, but I never got around to it for whatever reason. In a way, “Some Assembly Required” serves as a digest version of the abandoned sequence of posts I’d intended to write on the method I rely on to stay creatively focused and fecund.
Pointless and inchoate storytelling is definitely a huge problem — a pandemic? — in cinema and on television these days. It’s a problem in literature, too, but I’m exposed to so much less of it because A) I can only read so much, B) I’m choosy about what I do read (I have a long backlog of titles I’m predisposed to liking), and C) I’ll toss a book right in the DNF pile the moment I sense my time is being wasted. For example: The book you just reviewed this morning? I wouldn’t have had the stamina to stick it out. Bully for you for finishing it and leaving a fair critique, though!
I was just transitioning from Some Assembly Required to It’s Playtime on my WIP — the monster story set in Ithaca, New York, that I mentioned above — when the country went into quasi-quarantine, and I’m still reeling a bit from that; I haven’t been able to put the time to productive use because I’m having trouble concentrating. In a way, having this prescheduled essay post — and getting so many responses to it right off the bat — has forced me to sit at the keyboard and concentrate again, so it’s been a blessing; ideally, next week I’ll commence work on the first-draft manuscript with a renewed sense of focus. It’s just challenging because, as I said to Stacey above, everything I have to say feels like it applies to a world that up and vanished overnight. I’m just disoriented, is all. I’m sure you understand.
Thanks for popping by, Diana, and for brightening my day by sparing a few nice words. You take care, too — and for once that isn’t merely a polite parting sentiment, but rather a heartfelt plea.
I don’t often think about my own writing process, but you always make me, and I never know if what I do is really a process at all. Something just pops into my head, quite often from a dream and then I build a world around it–I hope that’s maybe what you mean by Some Assembly Required? At any rate, this was an excellent and thought-provoking article, with great comments, even if I don’t really know who Jon Peters is:-) Stay safe yourself, and I hope to see you over at my place soon!
As much of a lifelong student of craft as I am, Suzanne, I always feel compelled to stipulate that there is no set way or right way to be creative — there is only what works for each of us as individual artists. Even my own methodology, outlined in the post above, is a customized approach developed over several years, drawn from advice in screenwriting books, conversations with mentors and fellow scribes, and no small degree of trial-and-error. This is what works for me; “Some Assembly Required” isn’t a petition to follow my method, but rather an argument in favor of developing a method — one that lends itself to reproducible results.
There are countless examples of artists who made magic once, intuitively, and could never do it again. Helen Fielding drew from her life experiences to create Bridget Jones’s Diary, which had a huge cultural impact. But she’s never really been able to replicate that success — not even in the Bridget Jones sequels — because she didn’t know how she did what she did when she wrote that first book.
Ditto Kevin Williamson. When Scream (rightly) became a cultural phenomenon, Williamson’s “overnight success” story gave (false) hope to aspiring screenwriters everywhere (including yours truly):
Needless to say, that’s not the way it usually works: Unknown writers don’t bang out a draft of a (horror) script, sell it as-is in a bidding war the next week, and then watch it get produced exactly as it was written. That never happens.
But in this case it did, so fair play to him. And it is a brilliant script: If you take all the wickedly clever self-referential genre deconstruction out of Scream, it’s still a great, edge-of-your-seat slasher with a wonderful heroine and villain.
But… because Williamson didn’t fundamentally understand how he did what he did when wrote that script, he’s never been able to write something that good again. He’s had a long and healthy career, to be sure, but writing trite (Dawson’s Creek), exploitive (The Following), derivative (The Vampire Diaries), clichéd (Cursed) trash — everything he subverted in Scream!
You keep a hilarious humor blog and write wonderful fiction, so if “codifying” your process is going to jeopardize the good thing you’ve got going, then don’t. Having a toolbox is about equipping oneself with the confidence to know the creative process doesn’t have to be mystifying. Just yesterday, YA author Emily Wenstrom wrote about how pantsing her way through her just-completed fantasy trilogy endowed her with newfound appreciation for thinking through a series’ overarching shape and “small details” before plunging headlong into the first draft; as such, I imagine she’ll adjust her process accordingly. For me, codifying a creative process — customizing a method — is all about making writing the most joyous, productive, and sustainable endeavor it can be. If it’s already those things, well… then you’ve got nothing to worry about!
And yes — it would be nice to chat about all this in person over a drink! For this Irish Catholic boy from the Bronx, missing out on St. Paddy’s was tantamount to finding out Christmas has been canceled!
P.S. Jon Peters — who recently spent about a week and a half married to Pamela Anderson — was Barbra Streisand’s hairdresser in the ’70s, through which he networked his way into Hollywood, serving as an executive producer on An American Werewolf in London, Flashdance, Caddyshack, The Witches of Eastwick, The Color Purple, and Tim Burton’s Batman, among many other hits.
I’ve waited a long time on this comment, waiting for it to percolate. I know you put a lot of effort into your posts, Sean, and I didn’t want to be facile.
My first thought was annoyance. “Some assembly required” applies to toys, and I take writing seriously. But the more I thought about it, the more appropriate it became. The assembly stage is the one that I see skipped too often–people take their bright, shiny idea and trust to inspiration to give it life. That’s okay if it works, but it quite often doesn’t. The result is this meandering thing that twists and turns into interesting diversions, but lacks a cohesive whole. Ideas need structure, and most people don’t do this unconsciously.
The other culprit is a basic story structure that’s simply filled with stock characters. The resulting yarn is drab and unremarkable. It lacks soul. (I’m looking at you, Hollywood.)
A good tale needs both inspiration and structure. There are a lot of ways to do this–I write from a rough, one-page outline that basically follows three-act format. I give myself permission to detour when the spirit strikes, but I make sure my turning points come out in the approximate right places during editing. Some people use color-coded cards and have every scene planned out. Do whatever works for you–but use something.
This is a great post, Sean, and I plan on using it to help others when I critique on the online writing forum I use. A lot of aspiring writers need this information. You go! : )
Cathleen,
I would love nothing more than to be able to write an 800-word post about something silly or funny or amusingly trivial and altogether inconsequential. I so envy writers like Suzanne Craig-Whytock of mydangblog: Every week, she manages to turn some everyday experience or offhanded encounter into a gut-bustingly funny observational anecdote. She’s got a head like Tina Fey.
I don’t. I swear to myself every month I’m just going to write a short piece with one point to make — a single takeaway. “Some Assembly Required” was no different: I’d originally planned to expound a bit on that Joe Hill quote from Cemetery Dance — about how good writing is not kneejerk responsive, but rather deeply felt and thought — and it turned into a PhD dissertation on the creative process! I suppose in a way that only proves Hill’s point: that in thinking through my subject, and in the process of writing the post itself, I discovered I had many interrelated things to say, and built out the (increasingly complex) structure of the composition to support its (simple) central thesis.
And you have always approached my posts with the same seriousness of intent and depth of concentration that I put into them, Cathleen, so I thank you for that. And I agree with your opening salvo: On the surface, comparing the writing process to playing with toys indeed seems reductive. But, I reasoned, they are both expressions of imagination — only playing with toys is free-association creativity, whereas fiction writing is disciplined artistry; action figures are material abstractions of people, whereas fictional characters are intellectual abstractions of them. And I think the professional writer is one who has learned to take his discipline seriously, but also find (childlike) joy in the process — pros strike that best-of-both-worlds balance.
Hollywood has absolutely been the chief culprit with respect to the erosion of disciplined writing, and much of that has to do with its most powerful medium: television. I don’t need to tell you that there are now more channels and streaming services and platforms than ever, and that means there is a voracious need for content (by last count, there are well over 500 scripted TV shows currently in production). Consequently, screenwriters are being promoted overnight to showrunners without having “taken the staircase to the top”: It used to be you’d have to spend years on the TV circuit (writing for many different shows), working your way up from staff writer to story editor to co-producer to producer to supervising producer to co-executive producer to executive producer and then finally, if you were supremely fortunate, to showrunner of your own series. But by the time you got there, you were ready for that weighty responsibility — you’d been trained for it. You’d earned it.
By their own admission, Benioff and Weiss were “inexperienced fans” when HBO handed them the keys to Kings’ Landing. Michael Chabon is an accomplished novelist — and fair play to him — but what business did he have overseeing (the dramatically problematic) Star Trek: Picard? Megaproducer Shonda Rhimes has done, what appears at first glance, a very admirable thing by sharing her (colossal) success with her protégées — using her muscle to get them opportunities in the television business. But here’s the thing: Except for having worked on Grey’s Anatomy, Peter Nowalk had had no experience when he was given his own series, How to Get Away with Murder (and it showed). Same with Stacy McKee and Station 19. And take my word for it — because I have inside information on these matters — that these are far from the only examples of showrunners who cut to the head of the line.
But there’s such a high demand for content, such undue promotion is happening with increasing frequency. And because the preferred mode of narrative at present is these open-ended exercises in expansive worldbuilding that go on and on and on to no apparent point, the metrics for what constitutes disciplined storytelling — our very comprehension of narrative structure — has deteriorated. Game of Thrones has racked up more Emmy noms and wins than any other dramatic series in the history of television, and yet, twenty years ago, it would’ve been universally considered bad writing. Now GoT — a sprawling mess of a series written by self-described inexperienced fans — is the standard-bearer of narrative excellence for a generation that has no memory of a culture of disciplined storytelling. That’s why the craft is on treacherous ground right now: Writers are rewarded for taking an anything-goes approach to their work. We’re watching too much TV — absorbing too much bad writing — and consequently skewing our own compass for what’s good and what’s crap.
(If you’ve never read it, check out actor Robert Reed’s memo to the producers of The Brady Bunch, “Batman in the Operating Room,” in which the classically trained thespian schools his writers on the principles of dramaturgy. Mike Brady was indeed a wise man…)
Through my work as a screenwriter, I developed a customized methodology I now bring to my efforts as a novelist. But many (aspiring) authors haven’t studied structure (I learned everything I know about writing in the school of hard knocks, not from my bachelor’s degrees in cinema and English), and now they’re not even seeing it reinforced on television — there’s no opportunity to absorb structure even osmotically! And I’ve increasingly felt that’s a trend worth identifying, and questioning. And I think that if we learn to understand the act of creativity as the three-phased process I’ve codified here, we’ll develop a deeper appreciation for both the emotional and intellectual components, for both the free association and applied craft, of writing fiction.
On that note, Cathleen, I wish you sustained creativity and health in the dark days ahead. When folks like yourself stop by the blog for a visit, and engage me in a little over-the-counter conversation on the subject du jour, you make me feel connected to other artists and humans — another “lost” virtue I am learning to appreciate anew.
Sean
Well, I’m no screenwriter, but I’ve critiqued many short stories and novels that just seem to follow the “throw it against the wall and hope it sticks” philosophy. Geniuses like Anne McCaffrey, who apparently pantsed her way through novels with an innate three-act format, are rare. But I constantly see the refrain on writer’s forums to “do what works for you,” And while I wouldn’t tell anyone that they had to write in a certain way–color coded scene cards are not in my future anytime soon–people seem to miss the corollary that whatever process you use also has to work for someone else. If it has no audience, (and frankly, quite often deserves none) it’s merely an exercise in self-indulgence. Or possibly therapy.
As you can probably tell, I’m a picky critique partner. But fiction is important! I put everything into making it the best it can be, whether it’s mine or someone else’s.
As far as GoT goes…I have no explanation for its popularity. As far as I was concerned, it was vile. Slapping a post-narrative label on it didn’t help. World building is cool and fun and all that, but it doesn’t make a story.
However, I hardly watch any television at all, so perhaps that’s why I’m still a story purist.
And I like your assertion that writing can be something like guided, productive play. Figuring out how to balance creativity and structure should be the goal of every serious writer, even if the balancing act varies from person to person.
And don’t worry if you can’t do quick-worded, light-hearted stuff, Sean. You do you. : )
>“throw it against the wall and hope it sticks”
That can work – AS A FIRST DRAFT
Once you “pants” your way through a story (or far enough to see problems) you have to go back and fix EVERYTHING wrong
In fact, you should look at your first draft as a highly detailed outline. This means that all the work you skipped at the beginning of the project you now have to do after your first draft. Starting was easier, but now this part is tougher
After all, writing is hard work. There are things you can do to make it easier, and there are definitely ways that for you are easier or harder than for other writers. But it will never be EASY
I’d bet cash that most of those stories you’re talking about didn’t do that. That they were one draft and done. And I’ve heard about publishers receiving in early December novels that were just finished in the most recent NaNoWriMo. The publishers were not complimentary
Indeed, Dell: Writers — be them planners or pantsers — have to consciously give themselves permission to produce an imperfect first draft. The first draft is about getting the vision in your head onto paper — making the metaphysical material — and the work is always going to fall short of how you envisioned it; the “perfect” scenarios your imagination conjured looks considerably less perfect in pen and ink. But you can fix it in subsequent drafts! I know authors who start editing and revising what they’ve written (be it a chapter, a paragraph, and sometimes even a sentence) the moment they’ve finished typing it. Try to resist that impulse. It’s unfair to yourself, and it chokes the prose of room to breathe. Put the words on paper, and then keep typing. Once the manuscript is finished and you’ve had time away from the material, you can assess it with fresh eyes. Sometimes I’m surprised to find passages I felt good about don’t work as well as I thought… but often I discover some of the material I’ve produced is a lot better than I would’ve estimated!
When I was in high school, I studied sequential illustration under legendary Batman artist and editor Carmine Infantino. (He’s the one that added the yellow oval around Batman’s chest insignia in the 1960s.) When you design a comic-book page, first you do your layouts: a rough estimate of the size and shape of the panels, with “wire-frame” stick figures representing the characters and objects within. Then you move on to pencils: that is, fleshing out the illustrations with shape and shading. Then you ink: which is to say you embellish and burnish the imagery.
Writing follows an analogous developmental pattern: In the first draft, you lay down the bones of the narrative. In the second, you give it shape and form; you give it cohesion, and meaning. In the final draft, you polish, refining the prose and dialogue, and looking for opportunities to reinforce your themes and subtext now that you can “see the whole picture.” But you can’t polish a wire-frame model — that’s completely counterproductive. The trick for writers is understanding (and appreciating) that their first draft is merely a stick-figure representation — the foundation on which a story will be built.
Between the beat sheet and the first draft exists a stage known in Hollywood as the treatment, which, as Terry Rossio says, is pretty much a useless document in the development of a screenplay (studio execs don’t read them; they barely read scripts, preferring instead to skim the coverage), but it can be an enormous asset to the writer when he’s breaking the back of his story. For my WIP, I wrote a 56-page treatment outlining every plot point, scene essentials (location, characters, conflict, value change, etc.), major characters (including their traits and arcs), and notes to myself about setups/payoffs, things I’ll need to research when I get to a particular chapter, and thematic elements to consider. I’m a planner, so I like figuring out that stuff in a (relatively) short document in which I haven’t committed to any fully realized scenes or long exchanges of dialogue; a treatment lets me figure out those elementals before I wade into the first draft. It serves, in that sense, as a sort of “Draft 0.5.”
It can provide other functions, too. in 2014, when I was transitioning from screenwriter to novelist, I came up with an epic idea for a story — the novel that will be my Dracula. I pitched it to colleagues (screenwriters and producers) just to make sure the idea was as good as I suspected, and I got an overwhelmingly enthusiastic response. (Part of the art of pitching is learning to read the room — to interpret the actual level of enthusiasm regardless of any lip service being paid — and I confidently determined the concept was a winner.) Furthermore, though the idea was unambiguously commercial and cinematic, I knew it would make first and foremost a great novel. So, I decided that’s the medium for which it would be written. There was only one problem…
I wasn’t ready to write it. The project is an ambitious period epic (told from multiple first-person perspectives), and I’d never professionally written anything other than a screenplay (which is a blueprint for a story but not a finished narrative entity unto itself). I knew that if I tackled the project as my first novel, I wouldn’t do it justice. I needed to write a few other books first — to find my literary sea legs, if you like. So I spent a week compiling a 44-page treatment that consisted of the concept, the characters, and a beat-for-beat breakdown of the plot; I wanted to document all my ideas for the project while I was still passionate about them. That way, when I was ready — and I’m planning on writing the book after I finish what I’m currently working on — I could read the document and pick up exactly where I’d left off in 2014. It’s like my Grail Diary, in a way: a complete record of every idea I came up with for the project before it dissipated back into the ether. I’ve no doubt that when I reread the treatment I’ll find a ton of things I want to change/revise… but I won’t have to build the beast from scratch. The treatment was a gift I gave to my future self.
So, the treatment is another tool — one I didn’t discuss in the post above — that allows me to “live with” my story a little before I commence its reification; it allows me to consider plot points and character arcs and thematic concerns in a noncommittal venue. There’s certainly nothing wrong with discovering those things in a first draft, provided you’re willing to do the hard work of throwing out pages upon pages of material and reconceptualizing, but that approach doesn’t appeal to me for a simple reason: I’m not a fast writer, and the mere act of forging words is so energy-intensive for me, I would rather work through story issues at a macro level rather than experiment in the drafting stage. I’m reminded of this quote from playwright Seán O’Casey:
Word up.
Are there geniuses who intuitively understand the fundamentals of narrative to even the point of repeatable success? Sure. But as I always tell aspiring writers: Do you want to place a bet that you’re one of those geniuses…?
“Do what works for you” is a general piece of advice that implies a writer at a minimum has command of the principles of narrative: You study Poetics, and The Hero with a Thousand Faces, and Vladimir Propp or Georges Polti or Robert McKee or all of the above, and from those teachings you draw your own customized, codified methodology. “Do what works for you” is not, however, an excuse to dismiss method altogether! As I wrote in “Saving the Cat from Itself”:
Those tools, techniques, and principles not only serve us when creating our own fiction, but when critiquing the work of colleagues. And the more I relied on them to offer constructive feedback to my writers group — to accurately diagnose problems and suggest appropriate solutions — the better able I was to apply them to my own work! The win-win versatility of those tools/principles is the very reason I extol them so fervently. There’s no question that the years spent as part of a writers group were a key component to my experiential education. I’m sure you are an invaluable contributor to your own critique circle, Cathleen!
Game of Thrones, upon reevaluation, isn’t even truly postnarrative fiction; it’s merely a cynical marketing campaign that wants the best of both worlds, deploying tactics from both the Aristotelian story arc and postnarrativty, resulting in an unsatisfying hybrid that offers neither the prescriptive catharsis of the former nor the intellectual collaboration of the latter:
Thanks as always, Cathleen, for the provisional and collaborative contributions you make to this blog! I’m obliged, my friend.
Contrary to your introduction, I think the timing for this reprieve from COVID articles is welcome. I am completely distracted by the sound of my world imploding but your article–so exemplary of how life was a month ago–is wonderful.
I appreciate that, Jacqui. My writing — the daily structure, intellectual stimulation, social interaction (through this blog), and escapist respite from our dispiriting reality it offers — has been a godsend these past weeks. When I go into the world of my WIP for three or four hours a day, I’m not thinking about anything other than those characters and their problems. There are worse ways to endure a quarantine. I’m sure you can relate. Thanks for the encouraging word!