tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13294573.post5910921430629765494..comments2024-03-29T04:56:23.027-04:00Comments on Cockeyed Caravan: Storyteller’s Rulebook #37: Why Do Hamlet and Batman Delay?Matt Birdhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07319984238456281734noreply@blogger.comBlogger3125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13294573.post-6636113254327877272013-11-21T01:04:40.656-05:002013-11-21T01:04:40.656-05:00How about blackmail? That's a good one. The pr...How about blackmail? That's a good one. The protagonist is blackmailed by the antagonist, which leads him to pursue a number of ineffectual half-measures before finally confronting the antagonist. In other words, you make "killing" the last resort, not the first and most obvious choice.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13294573.post-47694438052994391312010-07-28T00:12:12.509-04:002010-07-28T00:12:12.509-04:00Oh sure, a smartly-written thriller can avoid thes...Oh sure, a smartly-written thriller can avoid these awkward machinations, but you can't always be re-inventing the game. Sometimes you have to be willing to write meat-and-potatoes old-fashioned stuff, and that means that you have to know how to solve these classic problems.<br /><br />But yeah, I guess that's my whole point here, really. Write something clever so that you don't have to have to resort to awkward fixes like these.Matt Birdhttp://cockeyedcaravan.blogspot.comnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13294573.post-91108566135133714702010-07-27T16:52:59.219-04:002010-07-27T16:52:59.219-04:00Matt, is a thriller story simply a machine for del...Matt, is a thriller story simply a machine for delaying a showdown between black and white hats? Once again, your job as a writer is to not just write the same thrown-out-the-window scene again and again, but to make it new. I can think of a number of fresh strategies from the best thrillers of the aughts. You can compress what we expect to see and fast-forward to the next beat, in the manner of newer HK and Korean genre films like INFERNAL AFFAIRS and SYMPATHY FOR MR. VEGEANCE, where everything that happens in the first 40 minutes of these films would be the entire arc of most American pictures. These films also sometimes play with shifts in identification, as antagonists become protagonists halfway through. You can use elision, repetition and puzzle structure to keep the hero and the bad guy working as hard as the audience to keep up -- PRIMER, MEMENTO, SHADOW 19, SOURCE CODE. (In a lot of these puzzle films, the true antagonist is fate or the hero himself; hence the necessity of building in multiple stand-in bad guys) You can add a ticking clock and/or a contained space and pile on the antagonists, as in the two David Koepp NY thrillers PANIC ROOM and PREMIUM RUSH. Cut right to the showdown early on and then ask yourself what happens next.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.com