Storyteller's Rulebook #173: Know How to Dog Whistle

Writing dialogue for corrupt politicians and businessmen can be hard.  On the one hand, they rarely say, “So I’m corrupt, so what?” or, “The law doesn’t apply to us!” or “We may have to threaten violence,” or “Screw the voters,” but on the other hand, they don’t simply deny everything either.  Skilled corrupters know how to express all of the above sentiments without actually saying those words.

How do you master the language of the corrupt?  You read their repugnant memoirs, or books of interviews with them.  Whenever I do so, I add to a glossary of corruption that I’ve slowly been building:

• Laws we don’t like = Legalities
• Rules we don’t like = Niceties, “Marquis of Queensbury rules”
• Lawful or non-violent = Risk-averse
• Our scandal = A “flap”
• Brutal and/or illegal  = Uncompromising, “Not afraid to take the gloves off”
• Brutality= vigor
• Brutalized = “cracked down on”
• Accountability = “The blame game”, Nitpicking
• Our critics = Hand-wringers
• We lied = “We showed a lack of candor”
• We screwed up = “Our plans were overtaken by events”
• We chose evil = “Our choices were unattractive”
• Criticism = Negative thinking

There’s a great line in “Havana Nocturne”, T.J. English’s wonderful history of the American mafia in Cuba:  Santo Trafficante’s men would threaten people by saying, “You’d better be careful or the man with green eyes will come and see you.”

Actual dog whistles are supposedly out of the range of human hearing, but they aren’t really.  We don’t hear them, but we feel them: they make the hair on the back of our neck stand up.  That’s what so great about this language.  I would sound innocuous in court, but in person its meaning is all too clear.

When writing dialogue for anyone who’s breaking or bending the law, write as if an incorruptible cop is sitting right there in the room, listening to everything. These guys talk as if that were true in real life, not just out of fear of wiretaps or snitches, but also because they know it’s a lot more chilling for their victims if they say it without saying it.

Storyteller’s Rulebook #173: Beware of Instant Conflict!

Did we all watch “Zero Hour” ABC’s short-lived, overheated “DaVinci Code” knock-off?  No?  Well, if you missed it, that’s your loss, because it was bad writing at its finest.  One scene from the pilot stood out, because it was an extreme example of a problem that shows in a lot of trainwrecks, from Daredevil to John Carter.

We all know that every scene needs conflict, yes?  Case in point: It’s often said that His Girl Friday has some of the greatest dialogue of all time, so much so that it has now become the template for every male-female relationship on screen: “We bicker all the time with rapid-fire, razor sharp wit, but we really just want to jump each other’s bones!”

But the heroes of that movie don’t just have conflicting personalities, they have conflicting goals.  He wants to win her back, both as his wife and his best reporter, while she wants to get free and move on with her life.  They disagree about the past (what ruined their marriage), the present (the best way to get this story), and the future (whether or not they should get back together).  That’s genuine conflict.

The problem with so many modern stories is that they show the very first meeting of a man and woman, only to have the two of them instantly launch into combative, flirtatious banter.

Let’s return to that tragic “New Yorker” interview with Andrew Stanton about John Carter.  Stanton is meeting with his editor, who is desperately trying to save the project.  The editor shows him a scene where our hero first meets a humanoid alien on another planet:

• They watched Taylor Kitsch soar up to save Lynn Collins as she fell from her airship—the Superman catch—and the newly met couple then carve up an enemy platoon. “Do you have a take where Lynn isn’t smiling when she says, ‘Let me know when it gets dangerous’? ” Giacchino asked. “She just met the guy. Why would she be smiling playfully?”
• “Mm-hmm,” Stanton said. He folded his hands behind his head.
• “It was a bump in the movie for me.”
• “Interesting.”
• Afterward, Stanton told me, “I was mentally kicking my own ass, because I don’t think I have a take where she didn’t smile—and I don’t want my learning curve to be the reason a scene doesn’t work.”

Daredevil was even nuttier.  In the comics, Daredevil and Electra were college sweethearts who were now on opposite sides of the law. The movie cut out all the history, but still had them sparring like old lovers instantly.  They meet in a café, flirt like crazy, then walk outside and start beating each other up in a playground.  Which is worse, his decision to beat up a random woman who turned down his advances, or her desire to beat up a blind man??
“Zero Hour” combined the “instant flirtatious conflict” scene with another dumb cliché: “instant conflict with law enforcement”. Anthony Edwards’s wife has been kidnapped, and he’s just a meek magazine editor with no experience at this stuff, but as soon as a hot FBI agent shows up at his door, he starts firing off rapid-fire sarcastic retorts.*

Yes, every scene needs conflict, but that should be because the characters have conflicting goals!  Until their goals conflict, they should get along just fine!  If she had doubted that the kidnapping had taken place, or accused him of being involved, or implied that the case wasn’t a priority, then you’d have a reason for conflict.  (And a reason for him to investigate on his own.)  Instead, we see that she’s obviously hyper-competent and totally committed to finding his wife, whatever it takes.  So what’s the conflict??

* These scenes are especially infuriating in our hypersensitive post-9/11 security state.  Yelling at cops or feds these days is a very dangerous activity that can instantly ruin your life.  And, of course, withholding evidence when your wife disappears, which Edwards does for no reason, will automatically make you the sole target of the investigation.

Storyteller's Rulebook #172: Commas Are Death

I’m really enjoying “The Americans” on FX, and the dialogue is mostly excellent, but one problematic line stuck out in the pilot: The Russian deep cover spies are debating a crisis, and the husband reminds the wife:  “Don’t forget, we’ve been at this a long time.”

Don’t do that!  Just cut out the “don’t forget”!  While you’re at it, cut out “As you know” and “As I’m sure you know” and “As we discussed before”. These words are like nails on a chalkboard to audiences.  If you’ve got a good reason for one of your characters to deliver a fact the other person would already know, then that’s fine: just have them do it.

Don’t panic and think, “Wait, the other person would already know that, I’d better make it clear in the dialogue that they aren’t hearing this for the first time.”  People tell each other things they already know all the time, but they don’t remind the other person that they already know it.

In this case, the husband had a good reason for reminding his wife they’ve been at this a long time—he was steeling up her courage for a tough job by reminding her that they knew what they were doing.  But he had no good reason for saying “Don’t forget” first.

The fact is that almost all dialogue with commas in it sounds weasel-y.  Characters shouldn’t preface things, they should just say them.  Here’s a trick that always works: When characters answer questions, cut out every “Yes” and “No.”  Compare these exchanges:

• “Are you going to the fair?” “No, I’m going to the bar” vs. “Are you going to the fair?”  “I’m going to the bar”
• “Do you love me?”  “No, but I need you.” vs. “Do you love me?”  “I need you.”
• “Did you hear the news?” “Yes, I’m so sorry” vs. “Did you hear the news?” “I’m so sorry”
• “Are you visiting Iowa?” “Yes, we need the rural vote” vs. “Are you visiting Iowa?” “We need the rural vote.”

Just lop off anything before a comma.  I’ve gotten pretty good at this, but I still overuse “Well, I…,” and “Look, I…,”  These are “change gears” words that allow characters to deflect or transition the conversation in the direction they want it to go, but you don’t need them.  Just let the character shift on the fly, even if it results in a little grinding of the gears.

For each of these, you may be thinking, “But then things might not be clear!”  Good!  Life isn’t clear.  Your goal should be to write dialogue with maximum personality and the minimum necessary amount of clarity.  The audience doesn’t want you to hold their hand.  They’d rather you play hard to get and give them the thrill of the chase.

How To Write Every Day, Conclusion: Is Your Goal to Keep Writing or Stop Writing?

My whole generation of screenwriters was raised on tales of the ‘90s spec boom, and it twisted our heads.  Like the rubes in “The Grapes of Wrath”, we believed that, once we got to California, we could just reach out our hands and pick the fruit of wealth off the trees.  Instead, we arrived and found armed guards at the border, keeping us out.  As with the Joads, it’s hard to get over that shock.  Many of us never have.

It used to be quite common to hear life plans like this: “I’ll go out to Hollywood, work for five years, make my ‘fuck you money’, and then move to a more artsy city and do what I really want to do.”  Of course, even at the time, this plan was short-sighted and naïve, but these days, it seems painfully quixotic.

Not only does this delusion leave writers unprepared for the reality of the marketplace, but it keeps them from ever getting near that market to begin with, because it makes it very hard to move seamlessly from project to project.

If you’re trying to write that silver-bullet, million-dollar spec, then you’ll probably be unable to resist the temptation to put all your eggs in one basket.  You’ll polish that gem over and over, send it out and then start dreaming of beach houses and fast cars, instead of dreaming up your next project.  Only when you realize that nobody wants that last script will you reluctantly force yourself to start all over again.

If your goal is to one day stop working and start coasting, then that’s exactly what you’ll do, over and over again.  In the end, you’ll achieve your goal, albeit with one small change: they’ll get all the money, and all you’ll get is the ‘fuck you.’

Instead of dreaming of the day you’ll be able to stop working, aim higher: Picture a fantasy in which you’ll be able to keep working.  Write because you want to write and write and write.  Write because you want to get paid to do what you would have been doing anyway.

That’s a much more ambitious fantasy, and it helps you create a much better reality in the meantime, because if you picture yourself writing in the future, then it’s far more likely that you’ll write today.
And writing everyday is the only way that you’ll ever get good enough to sell your work.

How To Write Every Day, Part 4: Work on Multiple Projects

I talked last time about the overwhelming urge to take a break from writing when you reach a tricky fork in the road, at which point you can simply write the bad version, or you can brainstorm new versions of the scene, as long as you don’t count that as your writing for the day.

But sometimes you just get that sinking sensation: You’ve strayed too far from your outline and now you’re waist-deep in the big muddy.  The big fool inside your head says to push on, but should you listen?  Sometimes you become obsessed with making the wrong solution work, but it never will.  Instead, you realize that you need to step back and spot that much better, much simpler solution that’s been eluding you. 

But try as you might, you fail.  You know it’s there, and you know that there’s no point in going on until you spot it, but you just can’t see it…yet.

This is why, if you’re committed to writing everyday, you need to be able to jump to a parallel project.  Some writers advise against this, because they say that you need to be able to totally immerse yourself in your world, rather than dipping your toe into different ponds, but I disagree.  I would say that it’s more important to maintain perspective, and the only way to do that is to take a step back occasionally.

Writing a few pages of another project is helpful in multiple ways:

• It buoys you up out of that sinking sensation and allows you to start fresh on new challenges.
• It reminds you that not everything is riding on your main project, so it can be what it needs to be, instead of being all things to all people.
• It allows you to move that big problem to the back of your mind, but it keeps working the muscles that you need to solve it, which makes it more likely that you’ll have that “Eureka!” moment, when a solution for the supposedly forgotten problem suddenly flashes into your head.  If you take days off to just think about the main problem, it’s more likely that you’ll forget it entirely.

But what if you don’t have another project ready to go?  That’s fine.  Go through your old abandoned projects and dream up radical re-writes, and try writing the first three pages.  Find another abandoned screenplays and write the bad version of the next scene you were never able to tackle.  Maybe, now that you have some perspective on those projects, they’ll come roaring back to life.

But it doesn’t really matter—Just keep flexing that muscle until you’re ready to go back to your main project in a few days.  You might just find that all those false solutions have melted away, and the real solution is staring you right in the face.  (And, most importantly, you haven’t broken your writing momentum.)

How To Write Every Day, Part 3: Turn on a Dime

My film school should have more accurately been called “Film Fantasy Camp”.  Whenever one student would gingerly suggest that another might want to re-conceive a troubled project, the teachers would explode with anger: That’s a bad note!  You can’t suggest major changes!  You’re supposed to be helping your peers perfect their own unique and personal vision, not impose foreign, external notions of how movies “should” work!

And that would have been true ...if we’d been on a “Screenwriting Cruise” with a bunch of moonlighting dentists who wanted to finally write those dream projects they’d been tinkering with, and then use their savings to turn those screenplays into a real-life, honest-to-gosh movies.

But we were kids, borrowing hundreds of thousands of dollars in student loans, and desperate to pay them off one day by selling screenplays to willing buyers.  For those of us who made it the marketplace, here’s what we discovered: There is no “i” in film. Writers are not there to please themselves, and producers aren’t there to please themselves, either.  They are both supposed to serve the same god: that aforementioned foreign, external notion of how movies work.

The best book about the reality of working in Hollywood is “Writing Movies for Fun and Profit” by Robert Ben Garant and Tom Lennon.  In their very first chapter, they say:

• Why do you need to be writing compulsively?  Because so much of your work will be thrown away.
• To survive in the studio system, you cannot fall in love with everything you write.  Be prepared to throw LOTS of it away and start over from scratch.  As a studio writer, you are more contractor than artiste.  Look at it as though they have hired you “write” them a new kitchen or bathroom.  Don’t let it break your heart when you have to throw out a week’s worth of writing.  It happens all the time, for reasons you can’t predict—the star of the film hay have just made a CROQUET film and subsequently will not GOLF or even hold a MALLET in your film because it will seem as if they’ve “done that before.”  So you will have to rewrite an entire sequence.  You will be rewriting all the time.  Learn to love it.  Or at least not hate it.  And most importantly, LEARN from your rewriting.  Keep making the script better.

As Lennon and Ben Garant continually point out, this doesn’t mean that the system is broken.  Casablanca was written this way.  The ending was totally re-written while Bogart and Bergman were standing on the tarmac.  Moves are collaborative, and they’re supposed to be.

But graduates of my school find themselves totally unprepared for this reality.  Now they have to learn real re-writing from scratch, which is going to be almost impossible because not only have they not been taught it, they’ve been explicitly told they shouldn’t have to learn it.  Good luck paying back those loans.

You have to be able to turn on a dime, not only because that’s a good way to serve your producers but because that’s a good way to serve your script.  Re-write scenes from scratch all the time, just for the hell of it.  Maybe there’s a better version.

Running into a problem on page 90?  Maybe you should trying changing a plot twist on page 60, and re-writing the last 30 pages.  Why not?  You aren’t running out of room on a 5-inch floppy disk.  You’ll still have all the older versions saved.  Re-writing those 30 pages might be productive, or it might not, but at least you’re writing.  You may or may not be making your script any better, but as long as you’re writing pages, you’re definitely making yourself a better writer, and that’s what really matters.

How To Write Every Day, Part 2: Write it Badly Today So You Can Write It Better Tomorrow

Here’s the number one thing that used to trip me up: I would sit down to write the next scene in my outline, only to realize that what I had planned didn’t quite work.  Then I would sit there, fingers perched above the keyboard, trying to fix it in my head before I began writing.  Soon I would boil over with frustration and give up.

One solution to this problem is to close the screenwriting software, open up Word, and start brainstorming new ways to write the scene.  This is sometimes necessary, but once again, as I warned of yesterday, it involves abandoning the hard work of writing pages in favor of the fun work of spitballing.

Inevitably, as soon as I re-entered “anything-is-possible-land”, I couldn’t stand to go back to the cold, hard reality of writing actual pages, which are always much more disappointing.  Instead, I would fall in love with the world of possibilities I had opened up, and give myself “a night to think it over”.  But that meant I had gone a day without writing any actual pages, and once I had taken a day off, the force of habit was broken, and it become too easy to stop altogether.

Now I know better: If I can’t figure out a better version of that scene, then that’s fine: I just write the lame, clichéd first-instinct version in my head.  As a result, one of three things tends to happen:

• In rare cases, everything suddenly snaps together and I write my way out of the problem, resulting in a great scene.
• More commonly, the scene sucks, but at least now I can look at the problem….
• …But what happens most often is that I discover the problems I thought would ruin the scene (too boring, not enough conflict, too much exposition) are nothing compared to the huge problems that I only uncovered by trying to write it.  (There’s no good reason for him to admit to the scheme!  My heroine doesn’t actually find that come-on to be charming!  The explosion would have eliminated the evidence!)

All too often, if you can’t solve a problem with the scene you’re about to write, it’s because you’re misdiagnosing the problem.  If so, the only way to correct that diagnosis is to start writing the scene, even if you already know it’s not going to be any good.

George Lucas didn’t wait until Luke Skywalker was perfected in his head to start writing Star Wars.  He wrote down the dumb first version that popped into his head, The Adventures of Luke Starkiller as Taken from the Journal of the Whills, then said, “Gee, this isn’t very good,” but there are a few elements that work, so let’s start re-writing, and re-writing, and re-writing…

Once you accept this, it makes writing everyday a lot easier.  Even if all you do is re-write from scratch the same scene you wrote yesterday, that still counts!  Writing three pages a day doesn’t mean that you’re going to finish a 120 page screenplay in exactly 40 days.  If you’re constantly re-writing bad pages from scratch, it might be more like 90 days.  But at that rate you’ll still be writing four screenplays a year, which is plenty.  The important thing is that you never stopped writing pages, and never lost your momentum.

But wait, you may ask, what if I can’t go forward, but I’m not ready to re-write what I just wrote, either.  That’s tomorrow...

How To Write Every Day, Part 1: Pitches Are Fantasy, Pages Are Reality

When we discussed this before, I wasn’t sure whether or not writing outlines should count towards daily writing goals, but now...

Whenever any profession hits a new peak in pay, even if that peak is the result of speculative bubble, the practitioners instantly declare that peak to be the new normal, and any decrease, even it’s just a decrease to previous norms, will forever after be seen as unforgivable.

So it was with screenwriting.  During the spec script bubble of the early ‘90s, studios lost their heads.  They were overpaying for scripts, and even paying princely sums for movies that hadn’t been written.  In the most infamous example, Joe Eszterhas scribbled a pitch on the back of a napkin and sold it for four million dollars.  The movie was called One Night Stand with Wesley Snipes.  Ever see it?  Me neither.

After the flop of that movie and many others, studios cut their spending way back.  Soon, with a few notable exceptions, they stopped buying pitches and returned to their previous policy of only buying finished scripts.  To this day, screenwriters lament the end of the glory days, and await the day when we can once again sell ideas before we write anything.

But the studios are right: Pitches aren’t worth anything yet.  This is actually true in a court of law: You can’t copyright an idea.  You can only copyright the expression of an idea.  Only pages are valuable, and that’s the way it should be.

For years, whenever I would try to force myself to write everyday, I would start out writing actual pages, but after the pages stopped flowing, I would start writing outlines for future stories instead.  What’s the difference?  It’s all writing, isn’t it?

No, it isn’t.  Anything other than actual pages is just pre-writing.  Don’t get me wrong, outlines and treatments are very important, but you can’t confuse that with real writing.   What would inevitably happen when I would switch to writing outlines, is that I would never want to switch back. Pre-writing is addictive because it’s a lot more rewarding than writing pages.  Potential is always better than reality.

Before you start writing, you can say, “What’s my movie like? Well, let me tell you: Imagine that Han Solo and Hannibal Lecter have to team up free the guys from the Great Escape!” That sounds great!  What a cool idea!  Then you sit down to write it and you realize that, unless you’re writing an especially silly (and yet awesome) piece of fan fiction, you can’t just appropriate the pre-existing value of those characters. Instead, you have to re-create all that value from scratch, which is damn hard.

It’s one thing to say, “My new character is going to be like Han Solo”!  It’s entirely different to say, “I just wrote some pages and the new character I’ve created is just as appealing as Han Solo!” The first is worthless, the second is priceless.

Force yourself to stop saying “I have a good idea for a movie!”  Instead, you should say, “I may have a good idea for a movie.” If you think you’ve got a good idea for movie, then find out by writing some pages. Ideas aren’t copyrightable because they’re a dime a dozen.  An outline is just a doorway that leads you to a character.  Step through it, get to know that character by writing pages of dialogue, and then you’ll know if have something real, or just another One Night Stand.

So if you shouldn’t switch to outlines, what should you do when the pages stop flowing?  We’ll pick up there tomorrow…

How To Write Every Day, Prologue: It’s Been a Hell of a Month

Funny story: A month ago, my weight loss and sweats returned. Two weeks ago, a PET scan indicated a 50/50 chance that my cancer was back.  Last week, I had a biopsy in the OR. Three days ago, around noon, my oncologist called me to tell me the results: Yes, sadly, the cancer had returned. But wait… two hours later, after the full pathologist’s report arrived, he called back and said that actually no, it wasn’t cancer after all--just an infection that has now passed and I’m totally fine.

So…phew.

Long-time readers will recall that the last time things went wrong, it snuffed out a hot streak in my career.  That was hardly a danger this time, but this latest scare also seemed to me to be particularly ill-timed, because even though I have very little career heat right now, I am doing two things better than I ever have before: writing steadily everyday, and moving seamlessly from project to project.

Of course, if you’ve been following my progress in the sidebar, you know that I’ve been sort of making a mockery of the concept: I’ve been forcing myself to write at least a page a day, but the result that been that I’ve been writing precisely one page a day.  To a certain degree, that’s because of my infection (my oncologist blames my flu shot) and the resulting flurry of tests and uncertainty, but that’s not entirely it…

You’re recall that the last time I tentatively broached this subject, I was forcing myself to write 3-8 pages a day.  But I soon discovered that I couldn’t even keep up with that longer than a month.  I still needed to feel “inspired” to write those three pages, and inspiration can’t last forever.

It was only once I got down to one page that true force of habit kicked in.  I discovered that, no matter how busy or stressed I was in any given day, if I just had to write one, I could still do it, just to say I hadn’t broken the streak.  And sure enough, as I predicted last time, the 21-day cliché kicked into gear.  It soon got to the point where it was painful to go to bed without dashing one off.

But now that I’m officially fine, starting today I’m once again holding myself to the standard to 3 to 8 pages a day, because I now feel that I have the additional resources I need to keep that going. This week, I’ll talk about some of the conclusions I’ve drawn that have enabled me to start forming better habits.

Know More Than You Show, Conclusion: Theme

You’ve probably heard before that you should withhold elements of the plot and backstory, but it’s not often pointed out that you should also play keep-away with your theme.

I’ve mentioned before that I disagree with the oft-repeated advice that you should have a wise statement of philosophy on page five.  If you’ve done that, you should delete the scene, and maybe replace it with a misguided statement of philosophy that will get replaced much later, shortly before the climax.  I’ve also talked about how, if you have a character who asks the thematic question early on, then it’s good to interrupt them before they can get an answer, because the story itself should be the answer.

As with character and plot, this is hard to do.  You’ve got something to say, and now you want to say it …but you have to stop yourself.  You don’t actually want your audience to hear it, you want them to feel it.  And they’ll only feel it if they’ve been allowed to draw their own conclusions.

The meaning of a movie is created not by the composition of the shot but by the opposition of the cut. It’s no accident that the inventor of most powerful cinematic cutting techniques, Sergei Eisenstein, was such a fan of Georg Hegel, who believed that new ideas could only emerge from the collision of old ideas.  Eisenstein knew that butting two contrasting images against each other created more meaning than any one shot could on its own.

It’s tempting to process your own conflict and then present your audience with a finalized synthesis, because that way you can carefully control what their takeaway will be, but there’s no point, because they won’t care.  Instead, present them with a thesis and an antithesis, slam them against each other, and let your audience do the rest.  Force them to synthesize it, even if that means that they might reach a different conclusion than you would.

What were Shakespeare’s politics? Did he agree with Brutus or Marc Antony?  Prince Hal or Falstaff?  No one knows.  His plays are filled with huge ideological conflicts but few definitive statements.  He gives us a thesis and antithesis and leaves the synthesis to us.  That’s why he’s immortal.

Know More Than You Show, Part 2: Plot

I don’t use the word “plot” very often, because I prefer to talk about structure, but there is a difference.  “Plot” refers to everything that happens, from start to finish, including everything that happens off screen, whereas structure refers to the story as experienced by the audience.  Obviously, since I’m audience-focused, I tend to focus on the latter, but it’s important not to blur that distinction.

I’ve said before that explaining the plot is not your characters’ job: the obstacles and conflicts, external and internal, should be visibly apparent, without forcing your characters to explain them to the audience.  But now I’ll go further and point out that your audience should never really know the full plot.  As with character backstories, you need to know more than you show.

You’ve created this big, beautiful story, and now you want to show it off …but you can’t.  Your audience doesn’t want to be told your story, they want to figure it out.  The second that they understand everything that’s going on, they’ll lose interest.

I’ve mentioned before that I always ask people who don’t finish what I sent them where they stopped reading.  Likewise, whenever I start writing something and don’t finish it, I go back to check where I stopped writing.  As I mentioned here, it’s often about the halfway point.  Why?  Because that’s the point where I’ve finally laid everything on the table.

This seems counterintuitive: I’ve spend the first half assembling my characters and plot elements, and now that everything is in place, we’re off and running, right?   Wrong.  It means the story just died.

Not only do you need to have an overarching dramatic question that is posed at the very beginning and answered at the very end, but you need to have lots of additional mysteries propelling each scene forward into the next.  The reader is always looking for excuses to quit reading, just as you the writer are looking for excuses to quit writing.  The perfect set-it-down place for both of you is the moment when everything finally makes sense.

Don’t get me wrong, you need to have a logical and cohesive plot, but also you have to hide some of that cohesiveness from your readers.  They do not want things to fully cohere until the very end.

Sketch out your whole plot, then figure out which facts it would be most compelling to withhold from your audience.  First cut it down to just what they need to know, then cut it down even more.  Give them just enough to fall in love with the story, but withhold the crucial plot elements that they’ll crave.

• Show them that the villain is up to something, but don’t show them enough to guess what it is.
• Show then that hero has a plan, but withhold the linchpin of that plan until it goes into effect.
• Imply that the hero and villain know each other, but don’t tell them how.
• Show them the arrival of an interloper but make them guess why he’s there.

In short, make your audience participate in putting your story together, rather than passively receive the information you’re ladling out.

Obviously, this can go very, very wrong: “Lost” and “Battlestar Galactica” never cohered and their audiences were infuriated (even through they’d been thoroughly entertained for most of the journey...)

J. K. Rowling, on the other hand, did a much better job with the Harry Potter saga: A big part of the thrill of that series came from the fact that she had obviously figured out the entire, massive history of her world, but she wasn’t going to reveal each aspect of it until we desperately wanted to know it.  Unlike with “Lost” and “BSG”, most Potter fans felt tremendously gratified by the final picture that had emerged by the end of the last book.  (And it’s worth pointing out that, even at the end, she still knew more than she ever showed, as one shocked Q and A participant found out.)

Next, we finish up with theme…

Know More Than You Show, Part 1: Character

There are certain rules that I’ve frequently referenced indirectly on this blog but never explored in their own rite.  One of those is “Know more than you show.” Let’s spend this week breaking it down into three parts, starting with character:

Some gurus such as Syd Field insist that you know every possible fact about your hero, all the way back to where his or her grandmother went to college.  I would argue that you should be more focused on your hero’s present and future.  If you actually take the time to list out 500 facts about the past, then you might run into a few different dangers:

• You’ll bore yourself to tears, getting sick of your hero long before he or she has a chance to come alive on the page.
• You’ll commit yourself to randomly-selected story details, and feel less willing to change your hero’s past on the fly as you write, in order to add special skills, or tangled relationships from the past that can juice up the conflict, or additional ironies.
• Once you’ve created this epic backstory, you’ll feel compelled to reveal it at some point, even though the audience won’t care.
• You’ll be tempted to use backstory as a substitute for front story, differentiating your characters based on where they’ve been, rather than how they act. In the terrible pilot for “NYC 22” each rookie cop stopped the story dead in order to reveal a complicated backstory, but their current plans and tactics were virtually identical.

Instead, I usually suggest that you should just focus on those aspects of your heroes’ backstories that generate their metaphor families, whether that happens to be their home region, past job, current job, or developmental state (kid, teen, parent, etc.)

But, with all those caveats out of the way, it can, in fact, be a useful exercise to write out a full bio of each character, as long as you understand that you should never show all that you know.  Just because your heroes have baggage, doesn’t mean that they should take it out of their overhead bin during flight.

One of the advantages of writing of a bio for your characters is that it allows you to search for new ways to bond with them.  Give your characters gifts from your own life until they come alive in your head.  Don’t assume that backstory will get your audience to fall in love with the character, but do anything you can to makes sure that you fall in love, even if your audience never knows why. 

Even when you’ve cut out unnecessary backstory, there are other ways to know more than you show when it comes to character.  Beware of moments that perfectly sum up a character’s personality, all in one scene.  Ironically, this might be the scene that made you want to write this story in the first place, because it made the character instantly come to life in your mind, but now it’s time to kill your darlings and cut it, because you don’t want a character that can be summed up in one scene.

The audience doesn’t want the whole package neatly laid out before them: they want to piece the character together out of different parts.  A great character is compelling because we are compelled to find out more about him or her.   That’s not true if the character is neatly summed up right away.  This also applies to plot, which we’ll get to tomorrow…

Storyteller's Rulebook #171: It’s Impossible To Learn If You Feel You Shouldn’t Have To

Sadly, we now have seven active remotes in our living room (TV, DVR, Blu-Ray, DVD, Wii, Speakers, and AC, I think).  I consider this to be an annoyance, but my wife (usually a sweet-tempered soul) considers this to be an affront.  It offends her sense of how the world should work.  Whenever I fumble with the pile of remotes, she indignantly laments aloud that she would have no idea how to turn on her own TV if her life depended on it.

But…is that true?

We’re talking about a massive amount of time and resources she’s already invested here:  over a thousand of dollars worth of equipment we have acquired over ten years of marriage, hundreds of DVDs she has purchased or received, an infinite cornucopia of cable and Netflix programming now available instantly. All denied to her.

Now you have to understand, my wife is very technically proficient.  Over at her own much-more-successful-than-mine blog, she codes her own html and creates and embeds sophisticated videos and podcasts.  Tech does not intimidate her.

So why does she declare that all is lost when the remotes come out?  I mean yeah, it’s annoying, but there’s basically a five-step protocol to determine which remotes to use in which order.  It would take her maybe ten minutes to learn it and then she’d know it forever (or until we get our eighth remote.)  Considering that she’s about a dozen times smarter than me, this wouldn’t be a big strain for her.

But I totally believe her when she says she can’t learn it.  Of course she can’t.  And here’s why: she feels that she shouldn’t have to. And as long as anyone feels that way, learning is impossible.

I’m the last person to cast aspersions here.  I have wasted years of my life refusing to learn things that would have taken me an hour or two to master, simply because I thought that I shouldn’t have to. That’s mostly what this blog is all about.  Every time I figure out something new, like with the last two rules, it seems so obvious as soon as I say it, so why did it take me so long to figure out?

As writers, we’re constantly being fed poisonous messages by crappy writing teachers and flattering books: “Listen to your muse.”  “Be intuitive”  “Be innovative.” “Don’t force it.”  “Don’t overthink it.”  True geniuses, we’re told, don’t put rules on their storytelling.  Great writers follow their heart or their gut, never their head.

But eventually you figure out that the people telling you this have had no success of their own.  You realize that even a brilliantly original iconoclast like Hunter S. Thompson taught himself to write by re-typing “The Great Gatsby” word for word.  You realize, in other words, that writers, like everybody else, have to learn to do what they do by analyzing what came before.  In the end, you have to learn all those rules that everybody says you shouldn’t have to learn.

That’s the real hard work of learning to write: learning to accept that you need to learn it.  If you can do that, you’re 90% of the way there.

Storyteller's Rulebook #170: Every Scene Needs Its Own Hero

Obviously, in most scenes you write, your hero will be in the scene, and will also be the hero of the scene, aka: the person we admire and want to see triumph in this interaction.  But that’s not always the case.

In some scenes, even if the overall hero of the story is present, the audience is actually rooting for someone else.  Sometimes we’re rooting for someone else to set the hero straight.  Frequently, for instance, when Buffy and Willow disagreed, the audience sided with Willow.  Buffy was better in a fight, which made her the capital-H “Hero” of the show, but Willow was wiser, which made her the “hero-of-the-scene” for most of her scenes with Buffy.

And what about scenes that don’t have any of our “heroes”?  There still needs to be conflict within that scene, and the audience should be able to pick a favorite to root for in that conflict.  Think of the scene in Die Hard where we cut away to the local news coverage: the anchorman mistakenly refers to Stockholm Syndrome as “Helsinki Syndrome” and his co-anchor rolls her eyes.  Even this small scene has its own hero and villain.

Even if the scene merely consists of two villains, then that scene also needs its own “hero” that we want to see “triumph” in this interaction.  We should admire one villain’s reaction to this situation (even it’s only to admire the competence of his or her villainy) and we should disdain the other.

If your hero and villain keep running circles around inferior scene partners in separate scenes, then the audience will get more and more excited about their eventual confrontation. The audience will start saying, “Wow, these two both dominate every scene they’re in!  What happens when they’re finally in a scene together?”  Which one will continue to dominate, and which will be humbled for the first time?

This rule is something you need to keep in mind when you’re building your ensemble: You have to multiply everything by two.  It’s tempting to say, “Okay, the aliens invade and we show how the whole town reacts, so we cut back and forth between the sheriff and the priest, and the school teacher, and the general at the army base, and...”  Wait, stop!  In order to write actual scenes, you’re actually going to need two cops, two priests, two school teachers, two army commanders, etc, at each location.  And each of those pairs need contrasting personalities because you’ll need to have conflict between the scene partners.  Doesn’t that make you re-think you inclination to have so many settings?

Storyteller's Rulebook #169: Move Up the Timeline

Here’s another big breakthrough for my understanding of structure.  There’s a big paradox in the rules of sympathy/empathy that I somehow never noticed for all these years.  We all know that, on the one hand…

• Your hero should be clever and resourceful from beginning to end.
• Your hero must shift being reactive to proactive in the second half of your story.
• Your hero should have a corrected philosophy and a corrected goal by the ¾ point in time to prepare for the climax.

Okay, so this means that, by the time the climax arrives, the hero is large and in charge, yes?  And yet, in the final quarter of the story:

• The hero should nevertheless be the underdog for most of the climax.
• Everything should seem to be hopeless until the latest possible moment.
• It’s inherently unsympathetic for the finale to happen at a time of the hero’s choosing.

On first glance, this makes no sense. How can the audience demand that the hero be proactive, and yet also disapprove of a hero for choosing the time and place of the climax?  If your hero is planning everything, then shouldn’t the final battle happen exactly when he or she wants it to happen?  And shouldn’t the hero have cleverly and competently accounted for everything, and therefore no longer be the underdog?

Luckily, there’s one simple solution that resolves this paradox and solves all of these problems.  Yes, the hero should plan when and where the finale will take place, but then the bad guy (or some other outside event) suddenly moves up the timeline.

As soon as you notice this trick, you’ll suddenly see it everywhere.

• I now realize that this is what was going on in Star Wars: “We’ve stole the plans that will allow us to attack the Death Star (Yay, proactive!), but before we can attack it at any old time (Boring, too powerful), it showed up to attack us! (Scary! Now we have to improvise, and maybe fail! And it explains how they were able to get away before!) (As I pointed out in this post, the whole idea that the Death Star was also attacking them was added in post-production.)
• And for that matter in Empire Strikes Back: I’m finally going to take the initiative to get trained in the Force by Yoda (Yah, proactive!) But I have to cut training short against his wishes because Vader is attacking my friends. (Scary! Now we have to improvise, and maybe fail!)
• Likewise in the original cut, (but not the final cut) of The Terminator.  We’re attacking the lab that will make the Terminators (Yay, proactive!), but the Terminator has figured out what we’re doing and he’s lying in wait to attack us (Scary! Now we have to improvise, and maybe fail!) (In the final cut, Cameron decided to chop out the turn to proactivity, and save it for the sequel.  In this case, nobody missed it.)

This trick allows the good guys to fall way behind without losing our sympathy.  If the good guys execute their plan just the way they wanted to, and yet it all goes wrong, then they look like idiots.  But if they’re suddenly forced to improvise and they screw up, then we sympathize— Hey, they did the best they could in a tough situation!  At least they didn’t sit around waiting to react, they were preparing to take the fight to the villain…but then the villain suddenly took the fight to them.  That’s how to be a proactive underdog. 

Best Hollywood Movies of 2012, #1: The Master

This was a love-it-or-hate-it movie.  Every time I tell someone that this was my favorite movie of the year, I find myself doing so with an apologetic tone, expecting to receive exasperation in return, but I’ve been pleasantly surprised more than once to hear instead, “Thank you!  I thought I was the only one!”

Rules it exemplified:

1. The Past is a Foreign Country, So Learn the Language: My favorite thing about The Master was that I wasn't thinking at all about screenwriting or other movies as I watched it.  Instead, I was overwhelmed by memories of my two grandfathers.  Despite the fact that they were extremely different men, Joaquin Phoenix’s Freddie Quell was a fascinating combination of the two at their most troubled.  I felt like Phoenix must have known them personally to capture them so well.  PTA and his actors captured the lost language of the ‘50s with uncanny precision.
2. Every Hero Must be Volatile: Overall, I loved how the movie, thanks to Phoenix and Hoffman's unbridled, unfiltered performances, seemed to hum with volatility in every scene.  I was squirming in my seat the whole time, fearing the next inevitable combustion of matter and anti-matter.
3. Show Us a Relationship We Haven’t Seen Before:  The movie did what I never thought it could do: make me sympathetic to Scientology, by putting it in its proper historical context of the PTSD-wracked ‘50s and showing that, for thoroughly-damaged individuals like Freddie, who were impervious to conventional psychotherapy, only direct confrontation by a fellow nutjob provided any hope of self-help.  The violently symbiotic relationship that the two form is utterly believable to me and yet unlike anything I’ve seen onscreen.  I debated in my head for days whether or not the positive results (for Freddie) justified Hoffman’s megalomania.

Don't get me wrong, like almost everything else I saw this year, the movie was somewhat bloated and shapeless, and not the sort of thing that anyone should try at home, but Paul Thomas Anderson transcends traditional moviemaking wisdom here and writes with lightning onto the screen. For once, I’ll have a not-so-anxious Oscar night, because the movie I think should win isn’t even nominated.

Best Hollywood Movies of 2012, #2: Lincoln

I’ve praised this movie already, but let’s go into more depth...  

Rules It Exemplifies:

1. A Hero Needs Special Skills Learned in the Past: The lesson of Lincoln, and Lincoln, is that the greatest weapon a president can have is the ability to disarm (and thereby defang) his adversaries, which Lincoln does with an endless stream of inappropriate (but pointed) back-woods humor. (This is a weapon that LBJ and GWB also wielded expertly, for good or ill).  Kushner and Day-Lewis masterfully recreate Lincoln’s canny charade: folksy hick on the surface, quick-eyed political mongoose underneath. 
2. A Movie is About a Person’s Problem: Kushner famously started out by attempting to cover 1863-65, but he got though hundreds of pages without making it to 1864, so he started over.  Then he tried to just cover the four months of 1865, which turned out to be 500 pages!  (Somebody publish that version please!)  Spielberg, to his infinite credit, got to page 100 and said, “Hey, that’s a movie right there, let’s just stop at the end of January.”  This isn’t really a bio-pic: it’s just the story of one problem: the passing of the 13th Amendment in the House.  Of course, in Kushner’s capable hands, that’s enough to give a full and rich portrait of the man with the plan. 
3. Successes and Failures Should Be Ironic: I talked here about how every step of this process is deeply ironic, but…

...Since I seemed overly-dismissive on that point last time, let me describe in a little more detail how this seemed to be different from the Spielberg I’d come to know and loathe.  My chief problem is Spielberg’s tendency to eliminate all irony and ambiguity from his movies.  I discussed Amistad last time, but there are so many more examples…

• The real Oskar Schindler was just as heroic but far less saintly than the movie version, and he would have made for a more complex and human movie.
• After a nice tense scene in Saving Private Ryan in which the platoon is left riven with doubt about whether or not they should have let that German go, he helpfully comes back and kills off a few of them, eliminating all ambiguity…
• …and my all-time favorite example: The titular reports in “Minority Report” (indicating uncertainly about what the future will bring) turn out to be mere red herrings, and in fact Tom Cruise was falsely fingered for the crime not because of any unknowable gap between fate and free will, but simply because he was framed by his boss.

There were still glimpses of these problem in Lincoln: John Williams’s clunky score shifts gears between “this is a meaningful scene” and “this is a funny scene” with all the subtlety of a record-scratch, and Janusz Kaminski’s typically over-pretty cinematography tends to ladle on the pseudo-profundity at precisely those moments that Day-Lewis would rather underplay. 

My reflexive distaste for Spielberg is still strong enough that I give most of the credit for this movie to Kushner and Day-Lewis, but I am nevertheless willing to admit that the old duffer left me very pleasantly surprised this time around.

Best Hollywood Movies of 2012, #3: Argo

Allow me to warn you upfront that my attempts to praise Argo may get buried under complaints about Zero Dark Thirty. They make for such a perfect Goofus and Gallant pairing.  

Rules It Exemplifies:

1. Know the Way the World Works: What makes Argo so good is the same thing that made Zero Dark Thirty so phony.  ZDT shows us what the CIA wishes it was: swaggering, hyper-focused, ultra-serious ass-kickers in a world full of pansies. It attempts to re-write a sloppy, shameful, sadistic, ten-year-long fiasco into a brilliant step-by-step manhunt by Very Serious People. Argo, on the other hand, starts by admitting the simple truth: The CIA, by design, is an agency of last resort.  All they can do, at their best, is dive into messy situations and try to make the most of the mess. ZDT imagines stoic superheroes doing righteous work in a black and white world (or, more to the point, white vs. brown), while Argo’s spies are everyday schlubs doing an absurd job in morally-murky situations the best way they know how.  Argo had its own falsifications (pretending they were almost caught at the end when they weren’t) but, crucially, its not lying to itself, or us, about how the world works.
2. Listen to Real Cops and Criminals: I’ve read way too many CIA memoirs and the casual argot in Argo rang true in so many little ways, whereas every macho “You can’t handle the truth!” line in ZDT rang laughably false.  (ZDT actually showed one of its not-tough-enough bosses practicing his putting in the office!  Base your details on original observations, not clichés that you picked up from old New Yorker cartoons!)
3. Ideas are the Enemy of Observations: But Affleck’s eye for detail also serves a deeper purpose.  He keeps circumventing our urge to form parallels between this story and our current troubles.  Instead, he keeps reminding us that 1979 is a foreign country, giving us an avalanche of amusing “I forgot all about that!” period details (I love the wrecked Hollywood sign!). His all-too-human Iranians (sometimes scary, sometimes sympathetic, sometimes both) would rather look back to 1953 than look ahead to 2012. 

Tomorrow, the other movie that might win on Sunday…

Best Hollywood Movies of 2012, #4: Django Unchained

I thought Inglorious Basterds was good but very overrated, so I was quite surprised at how much better I liked this follow-up...  

Rules It Exemplifies: 

1. Genius Doesn’t Innovate, It Cultivates: At first, Tarantino wanted to be Godard, (he even named his production company A Band Apart) and they did have certain things in common: both were bold, visceral, post-modern, wildly talented bad-boy rulebreakers. But it soon became clear that Tarantino would never measure up.  Where Godard was lean, Tarantino was bloated, where Godard was prolific, Tarantino dawdled.  Each contrast favors Godard over his imitator: sublime vs. juvenile, poetic vs. ham-handed, visionary vs. derivative…  But now, with his two latest movies, Tarantino has finally come into his own.  He’ll never equal Godard, but he now stands within spitting distance of inheriting the legacy of one of Godard’s great influences: Sam Fuller.  Fuller’s movies were deranged tabloid visions of America at its best and worst extremes.  He sacrificed sensitivity and subtly in favor of telling the raw truth as he saw it.  His movies were bracing, brutal, and bizarre, with peripatetic, episodic structures that forced you to re-set your narrative expectations.  This is the legacy that Tarantino has belatedly embraced. Django lines up nicely alongside Fuller mid-period masterpieces, Shock Corridor and The Naked Kiss, as a full-throated howl of unfocussed American rage.
2. Plot Motivates, Character Complicates.  Though this movie is once again self-indulgent and too long, I give Tarantino credit for pulling way back on the amount of plot.  In the movie’s best scene, the plot has seemingly resolved…but one of our heroes just can’t resist his overwhelming urge to vent his spleen and ruin it all.  Tarantino is finally learning that, in the second half, volatile character complications should drive the conflict, not an endless torrent of external plot events.
3. Villains Need a Solid Motivation, Too: Yes, the gore was typically excessive, but for once it wasn’t driven by meaningless psychopathy. I was delighted to finally discover a movie in which the villains were not motivated by a love of chaos.  Leonardo DiCaprio and Samuel L. Jackson, give horrifically logical performances.  Both characters coolly and calmly pursue their own best interests (and neither actor winks to us to let us know that he doesn’t approve).  In this movie, everybody only wants what they want.  Nobody wants to do good for good’s sake, and nobody want to do evil for evil’s sake.

Tomorrow, the return of Goofus and Gallant…

Best Hollywood Movies of 2012, #5: The Campaign

I’ve already spoiled the results, but you guys have convinced to go back and show my work, so once again, here’s my annual Oscar week best-of.  As with all of Adam McCay’s movies (though he was only a producer and co-writer on this one), The Campaign is meandering and bloated, with a fairly random second half, but, as usual, he somehow got me to check my narrative expectations at the door and go along with the jokes.

Rules It Exemplifies:

1. Invest Possessions With Emotion: Specifically Zach Galifianakis’s pugs, who serve many purposes here.  They start out as just an opportunity to “pet the dog” (establish quick sympathy) and show what a down-home guy he is, but then Will Farrell attacks him for having Chinese dogs, so his campaign manager makes him kick his real dogs out and replace them with manlier American dogs.  From this point on, the exiled pugs lurk outside Galifianakis’s house, staring in accusingly as everything that goes on inside, nicely representing his excised conscience.  We know what it will mean when he lets the pugs in...
2. Comedy Requires Pain:  I can get bored with political stories in which neither party is identified.  I’m the first to admit that both parties are just about equally corrupt these days, but that’s doesn’t mean that they’re corrupt in the same way.  These “who knows which party it is?” stories deny themselves the gift of specificity, limiting themselves to strictly generic observations.  This movie scores more effective points against both parties by naming names. 
3. This is the sort of world where…: The reason I hired a babysitter and went out and saw this movie was because of the bust-a-gut trailer moment when Will Farrell punched out a baby.  Now you know that I’ve complained about CGI, but here (as with this other rare exception), it was a boon: If the punching of that baby had been at all realistic, nobody would have laughed.  But the slo-mo ripple of the punch across the baby’s face makes the joke work because it’s not realistic...  Comedy requires pain, but just enough pain to get a big laugh that doesn’t turn into a scream. 

Tomorrow, a much blacker comedy...

What’s the Matter with Hollywood (Or Is It Me)?

In response to my last post, some of you suggested that I write more about recent movies. And, indeed, this is the time of year that I usually talk about my favorite Hollywood movies of the year and how they reflect various pieces of advice that I’ve given. In preparation for just such a piece, I got caught up on a lot of movies from this year…and I was kind of horrified.

Picture above is Entertainment Weekly’s averaged-out grades (albeit using a bizarre selection of critics) for most of the movies that came out this year. I’ve added the running time for each one, and my own grade for the ones I saw. (“F” means that no scene impressed me, “A” means every scene impressed me.)

Looking at the results, you’ll notice a few things:

• In most cases, my grade is much lower than the critical average, often extremely so. 
• The running times of almost every one is obscenely bloated. Not one of these movies needed to be longer than two hours. Even my favorite, The Master, could have shed those extra 24 minutes and not missed them.
• But the real problem, of course, is that almost all of these movies were either sequels, remakes, adaptations, or written/commissioned by the director. Almost none, in other words, were “original specs” purchased on the screenwriting market.

(Two movies that I thought were surprisingly not-bad, Safe House and The Campaign, are missing from EW’s list. I would have given both a solid “B”, and both, I’m glad to say, were based on original specs. Dredd is also missing, which, despite fairly good reviews, I would have given another “F”.)

Based on this evidence, I see causes for concern:

• Clearly, my tastes are drifting further from the critical consensus, which makes me feel increasingly unfit to speak to what sort of movies people should be writing.
• I primarily aim my advice to writers of original spec screenplays, but the market for such screenplays has almost entirely disappeared. 
• The increase in running time is an indicator, above all, of clout: The studios are so skittish that they say “no” every chance they get. As a result the only movies that actually get made are projects that no one at the studio is allowed to second-guess or say no to, either because of the director’s clout, the franchise’s profitability, or both. These aren’t movies, they’re juggernauts, and they simply steamroll over producers, critics and audiences, pummeling all three into submission.

So what is an amateur screenwriter to do? The answer, quixotically, is to continue writing original specs anyway. Even if they sell, there is almost no chance that they will get made, but you have to sell one or two first in order to be considered for the remake/sequel/adaptation assignments that make up almost all of the available work, for now and for the foreseeable future. But it becomes increasingly hard to know if you’re doing a good job, because there are almost no successful examples to compare yourself to, (and those that do sneak through hardly inspire would-be writers to greatness.)

In the meantime, do I write a best-of? Part of the problem is that even the movies I liked best were profoundly weird. I thought The Master, Lincoln, and Django were all pretty great, but would I really advise any writers to emulate them? These, too, were “clout” movies, totally insulated from the pressures of the market. Each does a lot of things that original specs simply aren’t allowed to do, so what’s the point?

This all helps explain my lack of recent posts, but rest assured that I have been developing some in-depth new material, including a brand new Ultimate Checklist that will debut soon, so stay tuned. (And the book is coming along nicely, too!) Meanwhile, I should probably take the advice of some of you and start looking again to older movies for inspiration and analysis, hoping to protect the wisdom of the past until the barbarian hordes have passed and a new movie renaissance can begin.

Where Was I?

Hi, guys, sorry for the no-warning black-out.  I suddenly got sick and tired of hearing myself pontificate.  I do miss blogging, though, and I intend to come back soon, but I'd like some suggestions for what would you guys would like to see next.  I've gotten some emails with some good suggestions but I thought I'd throw it open to everybody. What topics have I not yet covered?  What ramifications of my past pieces have I not yet considered?  Any old features you'd like to see return?  Let me know, and maybe you'll see that topic soon. (And be sure to check out this neat, new Pulp-o-mizer!)