Podcast

Friday, August 27, 2021

Episode 31: Irony


Welcome back to the Secrets of Story Podcast! James and I have both had epic vacations, so we’re rested and ready and raring to go. For this episode, we got into a long, unproductive, and very contentious discussion about whether comedy ages well, but I snipped all that out, so you get 69 minutes of sweetness and light as we discuss Irony in Casablanca, Blazing Saddles and Mulan!

Here’s the video I did about Irony in Mulan, so you can see some of these in action:

Friday, August 20, 2021

Marvel Reread Club Episode 9: December 1962

It’s another visit to the Marvel Reread Club! In this episode, we check out December 1962, including Fantastic Four #9, Journey Into Mystery #87 featuring Thor, Strange Tales #103 featuring the Human Torch, and Tales to Astonish #38 featuring Ant-Man. Hitchhiking in costume! Fake experimentation! Hypno-Rings! Giant Fly-Paper! Check it out!

Tuesday, August 17, 2021

Hey Look, My Book Finally Got Announced in Publisher's Weekly!

Apparently it's coming out in April of next year, which was news to me! They make it sounds pretty good. I might read it!  We've also got a great cover which I hope to be able to show you soon

Friday, August 13, 2021

I Don't Want to Shock You, But James and I Couldn't Keep to Schedule

Yes, we had announced that “The Secrets of Story Podcast” would now be biweekly, just like “Marvel Reread Club”, so you would get a podcast every week, but I’ve had computer drama, James is on vacation this week, and I’m on vacation next week, so, though we’ve recorded it, I’m going to push the new episode back two weeks. “Marvel Reread Club” will post as scheduled next week (though it may not have an embedded player, depending on my internet access), then the Expanded Ultimate Story Checklist will resume the next week, culminating in a a new “Secrets of Story Podcast.”

Tuesday, August 10, 2021

The Expanded Ultimate Story Checklist: Is there one character whom the audience will choose to be their hero?

As I said earlier, audiences will always choose one character to represent their point of view and their interests. This is their hero. Even in an ensemble story, or a story about various walks of life, the audience will choose one character to primarily identify with. They have to—that’s how we’re hardwired to process stories. 

You may wish to equally privilege various characters, but the audience will usually choose only one to fully identify with. In Traffic, only Benicio Del Toro’s story is really compelling, because he has the biggest challenge. The other stories are there to make various points, but once we’ve identified with Del Toro, it becomes more and more annoying to cut away from him. We know who our hero is.

So you have to acknowledge that your audience will begin your story by desperately searching for a strong character to identify with, and that they will expect the story to follow the arc of that hero’s problem from beginning to end.

It’s important to remember that your audience must identify with your hero, but they need not sympathize with the hero’s larger goal. “Antihero” stories are extremely hard to write well, but they can become beloved when done right. As we watch Breaking Bad, we fully identify with the tragic hero Walter White, and we even get pulled into rooting for his little schemes in most episodes, but we always hope that his business will ultimately fail and that he will learn the error of his ways, before it’s too late. This powerful irony fuels the show.

But wait, now let’s look at an example that breaks this rule and gets away with it: “A Game of Thrones”
One of the primarily rules in my book (In fact, I elevate it to the status of “Law”,) is that, even if you’re writing an ensemble story, you have to accept that readers will always choose one character to be their hero, and invest their hopes and dreams in that one character. And I still believe that, despite the striking counterexample of this book, which has eight roughly-equal points of view characters, many of whom have a claim to being “the” hero of the book.

Does it get away with it? Yes, it does. How? Well, I make it clear in my book that any rule can be broken, but you have to know you’re breaking it and accept that you’re going to frustrate your audience. My rules are just warnings about expectations your audience will have, some conscious, some unconscious. As a writer, you need to be aware that your audience will seek to identify the one hero of your story, and they’ll be frustrated with you if they can’t do that.

“A Game of Thrones” is the ultimate example of the oft-misunderstood phrase, “The exception proves the rule.” We are acutely aware of this rule as we read because he’s breaking it. Martin knows that we want one hero, and toys with that expectation for a long time before he finally denies it utterly.

Our identification is indeed split. Martin creates empathy for seven of his eight POV characters, (All except Sansa. Even when we’re in her head, we’re just looking down on her) and each of those is the hero of his or her own story, and potentially the hero of the whole series, but for most of this book, we do settle our hopes on one hero: Ned. He is the one trying to solve the book’s biggest mystery, and he is the glue that holds the other heroes together.

In addition to his own chapters, four of the other POV characters are his children, and one is his wife. That just leaves Tyrion and Daenerys, who complicate things. Tyrion is brother to Ned’s nemeses, and we have complicated emotions toward him. We know he’s not our hero, but we can’t help but like him, and we’re even tempted to trust him. When he goes to fight alongside his brother, we feel betrayed that this likable character is siding with evil. Even then, we root for him not to get killed, and at the end when he’s sent to King’s Landing to be the Hand of the King, we’re hoping he will mitigate Joffrey’s evil.

Daenerys is the most audacious break with audience expectations, in that her heroic storyline is almost totally separate from the others. She is the best argument that this is a book with more than one hero. But it’s essential that, at key points, Ned acts the save the lives of both Tyrion and Daenerys. Unlike the next two books, in which Daenerys’s storyline will be totally divorced from the rest of the book, a key turning point in this book is when Ned throws away his job in an attempt to save the life of this would-be queen halfway around the world. Likewise, Ned sends word to his wife at one point to release Tyrion when she has him prisoner in a deadly situation.

So we readers, as I say in my book, are indeed desperately searching around for one hero to invest our hopes in, and we find one, despite the fact that we have so many options to choose from.

Then he gets his head chopped off.

But the whole power of this moment is that it’s so shocking, and it’s so shocking because we’re sure he’s our one hero. That is the whole trick of this book. Martin knows that he’s breaking the law. He’s intentionally creating cognitive dissonance. He’s being puckish. He’s being audacious. He’s blowing our minds.

Of course, after this happens, we’re lost. We’ve never had a book chop off the head of the hero and just keep going before. So once again, we desperately search around for a hero, and don’t know where to turn. (Ironically, I think that most readers will land on Robb, even though he’s not one of the eight POV characters, and won’t be in any subsequent books either.)

Martin is toying with our genre expectations. He seems to think that fantasy readers have too simplistic a sense of moral complexity, and he’s using that to trap us. He knows that we’ll look for the one right hero, and settle on Ned, rather than, say, Jon or Daenerys, then he’ll force us to rewrite our sense of right and wrong and look for heroes in places we may not have looked for them before. That’s his whole point.

If you break a law, you will frustrate your reader. If that’s your whole goal, then go right ahead!

Okay, let’s see how the movies I’ve looked at have done with this rule:

The 40 Year Old Virgin

YES.  Andy.

Alien

NO. Not until very late, when we finally settle on Ripley once she takes over.

An Education

YES. Jenny

The Babadook

Yes and no.  Our identification shifts, but one could argue that Amelia remains the “hero”, because we’re still rooting for her to get over it once she’s possessed, and not for Samuel to defeat her.  

Blazing Saddles

YES. Bart

Blue Velvet

YES. Jeffrey.

The Bourne Identity

YES. Jason, although our loyalty to him is tested at times.

Bridesmaids

YES.

Casablanca

YES. Rick.

Chinatown

YES. Jake

Donnie Brasco

YES.  Donnie.

Do the Right Thing

YES. Mookie, for lack of a better one, but he’s relatively passive and we’re never sure if he’s a hero or an anti-hero.  It’s interesting that Mookie is sometimes the POV character and sometimes not.  Sometimes he leads us to the next character and sometimes the camera jumps away from him independently.  It’s almost as if the camera is the hero, sometimes agreeing with Mookie and cutting along with his perspective, sometimes cutting in opposition to his POV to things that impeach what he just said, or impeach what he’s about to say. (The case can also be made that Buggin’ Out is a co-hero or co-anti-hero, because he’s the one who is actually driving the plot and Mookie is just reacting.)

The Farewell

YES. Billi

The Fighter

YES. Mickey.

Frozen

YES. Anna, though it does a good job of also allowing it to be Elsa’s story in secondary way.

The Fugitive

YES. Kimble.

Get Out

YES. Chris

Groundhog Day

YES. Phil.

How to Train Your Dragon

YES. Hiccup.

In a Lonely Place

YES. Dix.

Iron Man

YES. Tony.

Lady Bird

YES. Lady Bird

Raising Arizona

YES. Hi.

Rushmore

YES. Max.

Selma

YES. MLK

The Shining

NO. This movie has one hero at a time but it’s a tag-team effort: first Jack, then Danny, then Jack, then Wendy, then Halloran, then Danny. 

Sideways

YES. Miles.

The Silence of the Lambs

YES. Clarice

Star Wars

YES. Luke, though we find Han more appealing.

Sunset Boulevard

YES.  Joe



Monday, August 09, 2021

The Expanded Ultimate Story Checklist: Is the concept simple enough to spend more time on character than plot?

When I started out writing screenplays, I had a weakness for overly complicated plots, because I would ask myself the wrong questions. Is that it? Are there enough twists? Is there enough story? Does it feel big enough? Does it feel like a movie? And so I would pile on twists, escalations, and reversals until it really felt like a movie. After all, only in a movie would all this crazy stuff happen to one person!

At first, my elephantine plots combined with my flabby scene work to create first drafts that were upward of 150 pages. Even a beginner knows he's done something wrong when that happens. (In screenwriting, every page is supposed to equal a minute of screen time, so you don’t want to go over 120 pages.) Soon, I figured out how to make scenes as lean as possible and to strip away enough subplots so my screenplays were squeaking in just under the line at 119 pages.

But I gradually realized that these 119-page wonders were still not working. A lot was happening to my heroes, but they had little time to think about it or react to it. There certainly wasn’t any time to pre-establish what their expectations were before a scene happened, so nothing had any irony when it hit.

I eventually realized my heroes were going on massive external journeys and teensy-weensy internal journeys. My first instinct was to add some “character scenes,” but I was already out of room page-wise. Even if I shaved off another plot twist to give them some rumination downtime, it was too little, too late to create a fully realized character.

Here’s the problem: When I was asking, “Does it feel like a movie?” I thought the key word was movie, but I should have focused on the word feel. If it doesn’t feel like a movie, don’t amplify the movieness of it all; amplify the feeling. This is the difference between complicated and complex. All the complications in the world don’t add complexity, which is what makes a story great.

I suddenly realized my characters spent all their time talking about the plot, explaining it to themselves and explaining it to the audience. This is inevitable when the plot is too complicated. But a good plot should be simple enough that both the characters and the audience understand it just by looking at it.

Once I understood my characters needed to have deeper emotional stakes—and they needed to talk about something other than the plot at least once per scene—I knew my plots needed to be massively downsized. I had been so proud of myself for shrinking my three-hour plots down to two hours, but now they needed to get even leaner: I realized that a good two-hour movie has a one-hour plot.

Die Hard, for all its little twists, is a relatively simple, self-explanatory story: Gunmen have taken over a bank’s headquarters and hold everybody hostage long enough to drill into the vault. The reason this fills two hours is the hero isn’t only figuring out what’s going on, but he’s also dealing with his own personal baggage, since the villains attacked during a massive emotional crisis.

In Die Hard 2, the same hero has no personal baggage, no emotional crisis, and never discusses anything but the plot. The extra room this creates in the script is filled by a far more complicated plot that’s not at all self-explanatory. In the first movie, you can tell what the bad guys want to do just by looking at them. In the second, both sides have to keep explaining every step of the process. Die Hard has a one-hour plot, stretched to two hours by John’s emotional crisis. Die Hard 2 has two hours of pure plot, which leaves us exhausted but not exhilarated.

No matter what type of fiction you’re writing—a novel, a play, a TV episode, etc.—you should always try to have a plot that only fills half your pages, and then let your complex scenes expand to fill the rest with unexpectedly volatile emotional complications.

The 40 Year Old Virgin

YES. Very much so.

Alien

NO. There’s not a lot of plot, but not a lot of character either.  Both are sacrificed in favor of tone.

An Education

YES. Very much so. It’s 90% character.

The Babadook

YES.

Blazing Saddles

 YES. Pretty much.  The 90-minute movie takes a full 30 minutes to construct its outlandish premise, but it’s time well spent.

Blue Velvet

Yes and no.  There’s lots of plot, but it mostly takes place off screen and remains unexplained so that the movie can focus on character

The Bourne Identity

YES. there are no plot twists in the second half, just character twists.

Bridesmaids

YES. We all know the steps leading up to a wedding, so there’s almost no time spent on setting up plot, it’s all character.

Casablanca

YES. the plot is very simple.

Chinatown

NO. Not really.  There’s a tremendous amount of plot. 

Donnie Brasco

YES.  In the deleted scenes, needless complications, like Donnie getting audited, are cut out.

Do the Right Thing

YES. Very much so.  There’s almost no plot.

The Farewell

YES. there’s very little plot. 

The Fighter

YES.

Frozen

Not really, there’s a ton of plot, and many of the plot turns are somewhat awkward.

The Fugitive

YES.

Get Out

YES.

Groundhog Day

YES. Plot and character are inextricable here.

How to Train Your Dragon

YES.

In a Lonely Place

YES. the plot all happens offscreen, all we see are the emotional reactions to it.

Iron Man

YES. There’s actually relatively little plot, especially for a super-hero movie.

Lady Bird

YES. Very much so.  

Raising Arizona

NO. Not really.  It’s pretty complicated.  The first ten minutes is all narrated montage.  

Rushmore

YES.

Selma

YES. It’s not an epic bio-pic of either man.  It’s about the emotional journey the two men go on over the course of a month or so.

The Shining

YES. As opposed to the book, Jack’s internal problems drive the movie, not the external complications.

Sideways

YES. Very much so.

The Silence of the Lambs

YES. We understand the problems and goals quickly.

Star Wars

Yes and no.  There’s a lot of plot, so much so that we need an exposition pre-roll, but compared to the prequels, it’s fairly straightforward.

Sunset Boulevard

YES. There’s very little plot.

Friday, August 06, 2021

Marvel Reread Club Episode 8: November 1962

Welcome back to the Marvel Reread Club! This episode tackles November 1962, including Fantastic Four #8, Incredible Hulk #4, Journey Into Mystery #86 featuring Thor, Strange Tales #102 featuring the Human Torch, and Tales to Astonish #37 featuring Ant-Man. Ether buttons! Commies disguised as aliens! Convenient amnesia! Tech bros! Antapults! Check it out!