The End of the World as We Nevermind

A joke I’ve seen circulating social media quite often is this: “Stop writing dystopian fiction, you’re only giving the government ideas.”

The joke, I guess, is that because dystopias are often written to underline specific and problematic societal and political norms by satirically torquing those values to their ridiculous breaking point, that it eventually and unintentionally normalizes the extreme examples that the author used to point out the absurdities of modern living.

Ha. Ha.

And to that point I’ll challenge the notion that George Orwell was some kind of prophet. 1984 stands as the quintessential dystopian novel, portraying a harrowing world of an omni-present yet ambiguous authority and panopticonical surveillance. And one leaps to think that Orwell is describing the future that we now live in, given how many things line up with our modern experiences with totalitarianism and the invasive practices of the NSA. I don’t want to diminish the modern relevance of the work. It’s currently significant, but what I want to make clear is that it was as significant when Orwell wrote it. He wasn’t a prophet so much as he was a scholar of how fascism operates through the arms of bureaucracy. Nazis rewarded those who provided information about their Jewish neighbors; spy networks have almost always been a tactic of every militarily-minded society; population surveillance has been the wet dream of dictatorships everywhere (it used to look like intercepting written letters, now it’s tapping into Smart TVs and that goddamn Alexa as well as examining piles of metadata); fascists have a tendency to make their face ubiquitous with pithy catchphrases underneath; populations, as a whole, have a tendency to react to things emotionally instead of rationally (compare the 2 Minute Hate to Tweet Storms about anything). I could go on, but the point I’m making here is this: George Orwell wasn’t trying to depict the future, he was describing his present using allegorical science fiction.

Let’s back up. All the way up. We wouldn’t have dystopias without utopias. Sir Thomas More’s Utopia, a fictional travelogue that came out in the early 1500’s, describes an outsider’s perspective of an ethical, puritanical island that operates under a strict set of benevolent rules that serves everybody’s best interests.

Everybody’s best guess is that Utopia is a satire, aping medieval Europe’s more liberal tendencies. It is, in fact, it’s own dystopia. If it was considered satire by More’s contemporaries, modern thought would look at it as a fucked up 4th world country. Slavery, pre-marital bonin’ punished by a lifetime of celibacy, women strictly relegated to the role of home-making, etcetera. Utopias don’t purely exist in fiction (and don’t give me Paradiso as an example, that shit is boring as… well, not hell, because Inferno was ultimately more satisfying to read.) because there is no under-riding conflict. If that sound familiar, then GOOD. That means you read my dumb musings on conflict months ago. Have a chocolate.

And so we’re back to dystopias. How come we love them so much? And does that reason vary from culture to culture?

The most recent episode of Wizard and the Bruiser brought up an excellent point about Akira: that a dystopic representation of Tokyo (re-imagined as Neo-Tokyo, 30 years after the Akira fallout, written in the 1980’s, 30ish some years after the Atomic fallout) where parentless gangs run the streets at night while the military tries to maintain order, is reminiscent of 1950’s Japan when the country was recovering from a devastating war and the victim of two Atomic bombs dropped on two of their civilian cities. In the same way that Gojira served to sublimate the horrors of the bomb in a way audiences could emotionally process, Akira is a digestion of the chaos the country experienced while rebuilding.

In America, I believe the shared fascination with dystopias digs at two things.

The first we are often hesitant to address– this country has been devastated. The genocide of Native Americans has been traditionally shoehorned into Cowboy vs. Indians John Wayne narratives, wherein the natives are either savage murderers or aides for Manifest Destiny. There’s a collective guilt there that’s been pushed down for centuries now but no matter how many times America tries to push a traditional western through, it sings the same old story. Dystopias, if you haven’t noticed, tend to put the atrocities mankind is capable of front and center. And there’s a reason why most post-apocalyptic fiction sets back technology and infrastructure back to a familiar, nearly western setting. Various reasons, probably, but the one I’m poking at is the coping mechanism for the blood spilled on the frontier.

The second thing to address, is the culminate fear of where society is heading. A lot of that is moralistic hand-wringing, to be sure, but many of those fears are not unprecedented. Nuclear holocaust is an anxiety we currently bear day-to-day, and have since the bomb’s inception. Again, here we have a means to digest that fear in narrative form that ultimately cherishes optimism. The Road ends on an optimistic note, despite all of the horrific and tragic build-up. The Mad Max series, while exploring survivalistic depravities, tends to end its chapters on a victory. You see the gore, you still get a (hard earned) happy(ish) ending and piece by piece, a little bit of that fear of the future is smoothed out just enough so you can get out of bed in the morning.

But whether the social consciousness feels regret about the past, or anxiety about the future, the sharpest gear in the mechanics of dystopias is set in the human brain’s inability to process reality. The world’s got some beautiful shit. The rest is kind of just… shit? And it’s not hard to understand why people willingly ignore the evil in the world. We get nauseated at the sight of blood. And yet, reality persists. For mental health reasons, everyone gives the news a break and doubles down on what is truly important to them because a day feels like a year if you keep up with everything. And that’s fine. To paraphrase Camus, you can’t live in the desert your entire life, otherwise you’ll go insane. Or, to quote A Tribe Called Quest, “VH1 has a show that you can waste your time with. Guilty pleasures take the edge off reality and for a salary I’d probably do that shit sporadically.” [punctuation mine]

Reality is hard to swallow. There’s a limit of what a person can emotionally process before they turn off and numb out. While directly reporting the distressing information about how the world turns is a necessary journalistic imperative, fiction isn’t bound to the same precedent while still remaining just as relevant. Dystopian fiction offers a method of telegraphing modern and relevant social pain and institutional betrayals within the world using the element of just enough fantastical devices to keep it distant enough to process with an indirect emotional stake. Example given: as someone who studied genocide for a semester in college, more people are comfortable discussing how despicable Death Eaters are than the brutal actions of the Khmer Rouge. Dystopias sublimate the horror of reality into an easily digestible parable.

And really, where the fuck else are you going to have the delicious opportunity to have a bedraggled Ronald Reagan fight a woman in football shoulder-pads, brandishing a sword made out of knee-caps or some bullshit?

That shit doesn’t happen in westerns.

If you’d like a dystopian read that also fancies itself as a western, you can read Crimson Stain for FREE here. It takes place ten years before the events of The Least of 99 Evils in a small Texan town on the verge of a massacre.

Scene Anatomy: Turning on Conflict

Here’s a joke a drunk woman who claimed to be an assassin told me in the back of my favorite café the other day:

“A gorilla walks into a bar and orders a banana-tini. The bartender thinks it’s really strange that a gorilla is ordering a drink, much less speaking English to him. He begins to shake up the order when he wakes up. He realizes that he’s been dreaming and he turns to his wife to explain this absurd experience. His wife isn’t there because his marriage is falling apart.”

This joke seems lazy at first but it works. It works because it turns well. It turns twice, in fact.

Let’s talk about scenes in narrative fiction. Without really looking anything up, I’d define a scene as a largely non-exposition, action driven piece of writing involving at least one character. The scene itself has a beginning, a middle, and an end and needs to resolve itself cleanly, while also furthering the broader story.

Real quick though, let’s talk about scene length. According to Shawn Coyne‘s analysis of The Silence of the Lambs, the perfect scene length is 1,500 – 2,000 words. That’s the “potato chip” size that’s long enough to accommodate the needs of the story without losing the reader’s interest. The goal here, kind of operating on the same psychological weakness that drugs, alcohol and app developers exploit, is to satisfy the reader with minimal effort such that they will be willing to do “just one more.”

This is dark magic we’re fucking with here.

But that 1,500 word chapter would be just a meaningless number if it doesn’t turn. Scenes need to exist on a hinge, otherwise they become useless exposition. Maybe useless exposition is your style. Maybe you’re making a point. That’s cool. But you’re pretty likely to piss off the readers you want to support you so why don’t you put down your pipe and take off your graduation robes. It’s goddamn July, you high-fallutin-nobody-understands-my-art chunk of ass-granite. You can be subtle and experimental but we’re talking about being accessible here.

Here’s what I’ve learned about turning a scene: you want to use that first 50 words to re-engage the reader with of what is happening– if you did your job right with the last chapter, this shouldn’t be too hard. It’s important to contextualize (but no need to go overboard) because people read books at different speeds. I chew through them like Skittles because I’ve really got nothing better to do. Still, others will read maybe three pages at a time and put it down. They’ll give up if they pick the book back up again and can’t figure out what’s happening. So give them a little help. You’ll notice that in TV shows, the plot of the episode is summarily explained in two pieces of dialogue at the beginning of the third act so that insufferable channel surfers have something to latch onto:

Joey: “No, I didn’t do it because I think you’re ugly, I stabbed your sexdoll because you slept with my sister!”

Joeghy: “Bro!”

(Dan Harmon writing table, here I come.)

In that contextualization, there should already be a conflict present as a continuation of the previous scene. By giving context to what’s happened prior, you’ll ensure that this scene can stand on its own. The remaining 450 words should explore the scene. Are your characters stuck in a tree? What’s that like? This is the best opportunity to flesh out characters and scenery because while you can and should certainly have this later in the scene, it might feel a little sluggish. Think of the introduction to every scene as a reintroduction to the book, because (ifyoudidyourjobrightlasttime) the book has changed since the last chapter.

From the Mother conflict, emerges another, or rather, a complication of the initial conflict, by the characters attempting to solve the previous problem (or from the “exploration” you took earlier). They can solve their immediate situation, but that only lands them into hotter waters. That’s how the next 500 words are used: the bartender wakes up which resolves his cognitive dissonance about serving booze to an ape and he sets himself up for the punchline.

Which blends into the final 500 that should definitively resolve the initial conflict and then maintain the emergent conflict for the next scene. I’m saying conflict a lot. Think of the joke: It’s been resolved that the gorilla ordering a drink was just a dream. The punchline is the grim realization that the bartender is alone and forgets that fact for a brief moment of sleepy vulnerability. HILARIOUS. If the joke existed in a chaptered novel, that would set us up pretty well for the next scene (does he try to date, do we see what his actual workplace is like, does he call his ex-wife to try and explain the dream? the possibilities are endless).

Here’s how I write a complete scene these days: I don’t think in terms of threes, because, if I do it right, that’ll happen naturally. I think in terms of twos. A night’s assignment looks like 750 words the first night, taking the previous chapter into mind, recontextuliazing it to progress along the character’s path and once the character’s figure out what immediate problem plagues them, I stop and go to bed. The next day I brush my teeth, go to work, think about the shitty situation I’ve left to these poor defenseless characters, laugh (because I’m a sadist), and when I get home, I know exactly how to begin because all I have to do is respond to the conflict set up for them.

That’s really the point here: Conflict is the narrative drive of story. To make a scene interesting, it needs to turn on conflict. Problems make the world go round because problems get solved.

And writing, if nothing else, is just solving a bunch of problems that you’ve made for yourself.

Because you have a problem.

Myth of the the Writer’s Identity

A question that seems to come up time and time again on podcasts, blogs and forums is this: “When do I know that I’m a writer?”

Answers and advice vary in profundity. There’s: “Not until you’ve written your 5th book;” “When you get paid;” “Believe in yourself that you are a writer and you become a writer;” “a writer writes.”

All of which is a crock of shit, because the question itself is flawed. Here’s a crass allegorical joke:

It’s Scotland, somewhat stereotypically. A man walks into the bar and asks the bartender for a drink. The bartender pours up a beer and slides it over to his patron.

The bartender says, “Pre’y good beer, thar, dunchoo thank?” and the patron agrees that it’s a good beer. “But they doon’ call meh McClarty the beer pourer, naw doo thay?” The patron assumes that people do not call him by that particular name. “Pre’y nice bar here, dunchoo thank? But they doon’ call meh McClarty the bar builder, naw doo thay?” Again, the patron assumes that they do not. “Und such ah nice stone wall outside, duncha thank? But they doon’ call meh McClarty the stone masun, naw doo thay?” The patron is getting a little anxious for the point.

McClarty says, “But yeh fuck ONE goat…”

The point being is that you’re often recognized for the things that you do and that may or may not be the things that you want to get recognized for. That’s beyond your control. The world is going to label you a certain way and that’s generally fine because there’s a 90% chance you’re a decent person– you’ll be labeled as a nice friend, a compassionate parent, a brilliant engineer… or you might be a bad person. Did you know that Stalin wrote poetry? Your high school friends will remember the cringe-iest things about you and that’s fine because you’ll hold their biggest embarrassments at ransom.

You might not get recognized for your writing, at least not in any critical capacity, and that’s fine too.

There are ways, though, to increase your odds, which is, you know, to write as often as you can, constantly improve your work and maintain a decent regimen to produce quality work worthy of recognition. Focus on your writing habits and open yourself to criticism; focus on projects that culminate in cohesive products so that you may move onto the next one.

You might be wondering, then, why I put “a writer writes,” in the bullshit category of common quips? Because, while true, it’s still in the hopes of attaining the “writer” status and while the advice asks you to focus on the grindstone, it’s still an ego trip. Although perhaps “trap” is the better word. As I’ve said before, buttressing your ego with art probably isn’t the healthiest move.

A lot of people want to have written a book and the belief is that you must be a writer to have written one. That perpetuates a certain fantasy that’s detrimental to the actual two components that are required to create anything: time and effort. That fantasy stands as a prohibitive wall between your goal of writing your novel, or screenplay, or mollusk-based erotica (you know, whatever you’re into) that prevents you from devoting that essential time and effort.

Actually writing isn’t sexy. It’s lonesome work that robs your loved ones of your time. It’s studying narrative structure in books and film until it’s ingrained into your fingers. It’s reading the same sentence over and over again until it doesn’t make sense. It’s trying to make sense of a history of stories in such a way that your own can wedge itself into. That doesn’t get a whole lot of light in the “Hollywood” portrayal of writers. The much maligned Californication doesn’t focus on the actual writing (an entire novel is apparently written off screen, hunted and pecked on a typewriter no less) so much as it fixates on the booze and the tits and the oh good lord my life is shit because I’m a shitty but handsome person. Midnight in Paris doesn’t focus on the writing either, favoring instead to examine the ways authors compare themselves to the classics. While that movie does a better job about describing the work (“writing and re-writing and re-writing the re-writes…”), it still fails to snare an honest moment of writing. Even one of my favorite movies, Wonderboys, which does an excellent job of depicting the distractions and pressures of “writers block” and the fetishization of manuscripts, still doesn’t have a scene longer than two seconds of actual writing. In fact, Goddammit, one of my most hated movies probably has the most accurate portrayal of writing– Goddamn Gatsby has Nick Carraway, in a montage, stressing over his manuscript and organizing the pages fastidiously. But Gatsby doesn’t count, because the movie is garbage and it still seeks to romanticize the art. Which is what movies about writers do. They make the title a tantalizing trophy for the shelf.

I think these movies/series exemplify the nefarious side of the ego-trapped coin. That many seeking to be a writer want the validation of having written a book without applying the effort to actually write one. The reason being, I think, is that they assume it makes them sound intelligent enough to get laid. These chuckleberries don’t understand the self-loathing, disappointment, or solitary ecclesiastic heights of the creative process, or the frustration of mild success. After some years of this, I stand aghast. Why would you want to pretend to be a writer? Don’t you know that this is a sickness?

Don’t pretend to write to get laid. Don’t write to get laid (because that’s just not gonna happen, friend). Don’t get down on yourself because you’re not famous. Don’t let the title of craft steer you away from the craft itself. Don’t give yourself a title at all. Dig into the work because you’re lucky enough to be crazy enough to enjoy this literary parade. It’s better to think of yourself as just someone who writes than a writer.

And if anyone claims to be a writer at a party and claims Hank Moody as one of their influences absolutely do not fuck them.

And keep the goat alone.

Lolita: The Power of Narrative Voice

Reading Lolita is an interesting experience. It’s supremely uncomfortable for the obvious reasons. A more subtle reason for the discomfort, is that Humbert Humbert is an eloquent, even funny, narrator that is seemingly fully aware of how reprehensible his behavior and thoughts are. He uses beautiful language to slow down moments and twists them into scenes. It’s not the language of a monster. That irony serves a dual purpose– it unwittingly ensnares a reader into sympathizing (possibly more accurately, pitying) or simply engaging with Humbert which then discomfits the reader further when Humbert’s monstrosities come to light.

It’s to Nobokov’s credit that he was able to do this in the voice of the narrator. In an interview with the Paris Review, he dismissed the notion that Humbert “retains a touching and insistent quality,” by saying outright, “Humbert Humbert is a vain and cruel wretch who manages to appear “touching.”

It’s an incredible feat, then, for Nobokov to have written a character in which he despised from the perspective of the despicable who affects an elevated language in order to garner the reader’s sympathy (the whole thing is essentially Humbert pleading not to be put to death).

What you have to remember is that Humbert is the quintessential unreliable narrator. Because he’s very forthcoming with the crimes that he’s committed and of his own repulsive desires, it’s tempting to call Humbert an honest, if not utterly damaged, man. And the objective events of the book I took pretty much at face value. He probably is relating the story the way that it happened.

Kind of. I trust that he reports the objective events of the following: Humbert moved into the house, he married Charlotte, Charlotte died, he kidnapped Dolores, raped her for two years, Dolores escaped, Humbert murdered Quilty.

Where Humbert’s account gets dubious is his own interior thoughts. He takes every opportunity to state how disgusted he is with himself as much as he does to place himself on the moralistic high ground (AKA justification). He takes great pains to discuss what a good father figure he was to Dolores, teaching her tennis and French. He refuses to say the F word, or any curse word higher than “bitch”-caliber. (Don’t trust people who don’t swear, kids.)

Meanwhile he does what he can to slander, ever so subtly, the other characters in the book. He describes a dopey villain of the other pedophile, Quilty, distancing himself from the badder guy (and describes their “final battle” with such lethargic energy and grace that it seems that he’s almost trying to make the whole thing seem mutually dignified). Charlotte’s described as desperate and embarrassingly clingy (which doesn’t quite add up to her refusal to trust Humbert before her death or the fact that her confessional love note was mysteriously ripped to pieces and flushed down the toilet, a flourish in the letter itself that Humbert admits to adding himself in its recreation). And then there’s the infamous through-line of Dolores being a contemptible, promiscuous little brat. All of that is meant to make Humbert seem more like the reasonable, albeit troubled, fellow that he presents himself to be amidst a cast of rather “crazy” characters.

Because his trip is about love, right? He waxes poetic about Dolores and unravels long-winded soliloquies about her beauty and her more benevolent qualities. You might believe him and critics definitely did (it says on the cover of my copy that it is “the only convincing love story of the century.”). But that too might be pure horse shit. Humbert’s interior journey ends when he claims that he is finally capable of loving Dolores now that her good looks have been ruined at the ripe old age of 17. That’s a pretty solid hint that what he sees as redemption is still mired in the psyche of his disease.

His elevated style breaks down when confronted by violence, at which point he becomes what he truly is– crass. As much as he expounds on the quality of the stitching on Dolores’s blouse, he uncharacteristically sums up the scene of Charlotte’s death rather abruptly and crudely: “the top of her head a porridge of bone, brains, bronze hair and blood” (p. 98).

Sidenote: It’s unclear in Humbert’s confession whether or not he killed Charlotte. I’m nearly convinced that he did given that the only other (flimsy) explanation for Charlotte being struck by a car is a mysterious puddle of ice that flung her into traffic, the softer way that Humbert recalls Charlotte’s memory after this point, and the fact that he’s a total fuckin’ liar– this is when he claims that poets cannot be murderers (I believe, apropos of nothing) while later admitting that he is a murderer later in the novel.

The way that he dismisses the scene in such a short, blunt manner indicates that Humbert Humbert cannot extravagantly explore the brutal reality of what he is or the consequences of his actions– but he also can’t deny them. It’s in this moment (and a few others) where Nobokov cuts the flowery bullshit and we see a hint of Humbert’s actual character: a pathetic, insane, murderous pedophile that wishes to delude the audience (as well as himself) as to the severity of his crimes. Humbert’s a man that wears a mask of intelligence to hide his barbarism.

In that Paris Review, Nobokov refers to his non-Humbert characters as “eidolons,” which the nerdier Final Fantasy set of you already understand as “a conjured spirit.” It’s a peculiar, metaliterary phrase for Nobokov to use, but one that distills a proper vision of the whole novel: while Lolita is Nobokov’s brainchild, every character described in the novel is 90% a feature of Humbert’s imagining of the events. Remember, Humbert is a novelist himself. And his story is a coward’s fantasy to appeal to the sympathies of his jury.

This book speaks to the power of voice as a literary instrument. It’s definitely in the Aikido Writing School of thought in which the narrator is able to use his own lyrical flow against the reader and fling them, in this case, into the vulnerable territory of sympathy. And for the investigative reader, distrust and ultimately the very basic shadow story underlying the entire thing. (Perhaps Nobokov is Ninja.)

If nothing else, Lolita endures as a novel that confuses many, angers some, and still stands as a nigh perfect execution of utilizing narrative craft.

It’s also the worst book to read on the bus, bar none.

There’s no good way to pivot to a sales blurb on this one, but I’ve thought a lot about how first-person narrative manipulates the story as it unfolds in The Least of 99 Evils. If you’d like to see my take on the concept, please buy a copy!

Thems Writin’ Words

It can be hard to describe literary styles. We usually fall upon metaphors and comparisons to other writers when attempting to distill tone and lyrical execution, both of which never seem to fully capture a writer’s voice. At the hazard of leaning hard on one particular metaphor, as well as hazarding the comparison to Hemingway and Norman Mailer’s non-writing interests, let’s talk about writing as fighting.

Specifically, writing as martial arts.

It’s kind of a dumb idea, but one that I want to flesh out because it allows for easily digestible, real word examples to help understand the conceptual mechanics underneath literature. And like an MMFA fighter, modern writers need a diversity of styles to balance out their stories.

So let’s break it down.

Karate was born out of necessity. It was the common farmer’s self defense against corrupt officials. It is straight to the point and eliminates any extraneous movements. It is efficient and quick. This literary dojo follows the gurus of Hemingway and Raymond Carver. It is verb based, rooting the entire story in action. No word is wasted– just a snap-quick punch to the stomach, kept short in distinctively brief sentence structures that the layman can understand. This style is commonly referred to as the gold standard of writing.

Jujitsu is weaponless combat, born from facing an enemy without a sword. It utilizes grapples and throws, exploiting the opponent’s momentum, to put them into submission. Likewise, exposition is utilized only after you have the reader hooked. This is your time to hold them by the neck and force feed them your story in a way that they’ll understand. They’ll be so relieved when you let them go that they usually won’t even remember that you held them hostage. It generally violates the rule of “show don’t tell,” but jujitsu writers don’t give two dookies about that. This is your fantasy writer’s bread and butter– Tolkien, Martin and Rowling all captivate their audiences with authoritative exposition that tells the reader the way things are (Tolkien by way of intense histories, Rowling with a surrogate, eg, Hagrid explaining everything to Harry “Hot Pockets” Potter). Once the reader has submitted to this world view (via the suspension of disbelief), the author allows the reader’s imagination to run wild and then capitalizes on that momentum to throw the reader to the ground and hold them with another expository grapple.

Kung Fu is artful and hypnotic, much like a dance but with a pragmatic reason. The goal is to stagger and intimidate your foe by your performance and obfuscate your movements in a way that they cannot anticipate the next move. Because flourish and grace are celebrated in this fighting style, prosaic writers are Kung Fu masters. Don Delilo, Haruki Murakami, Ken Kesey, Ursula Le Guin– these writers are experts in describing the moments and revealing them with colorful language. Kung Fu masters relish the singular moment and stay there with intense focus. And there’s a split between internal and external intensity. While concentration and focus on interiority can lead towards some personal truths we usually hold locked inside us, similar truths can come from an aggressive breakdown of landscapes, a house, a pair of old shoes and society at large. The general principle in Kung Fu writing is that there’s beauty in everything.

Aikido, similar to Jujitsu, is predicated on the notion that it’s better to use your opponent’s momentum against themselves, instead of exhausting your own energy. You ever watch Steven Seagal fight a bunch a dudes at once? It’s nuts. He literally just stands there casually and redirects his opponents’ movements into another direction. That placid, casual focus is why I couch the masters of tone into the Aikido camp. Cormac McCarthy, Chuck Palahniuk, Vonnegut, Raymond Chandler (It’s pretty apparent I need to read more female authors, I know), these guys confidently stack up their literary voice to the point where it controls the narrative. The reader accepts this voice rather organically, as the style is generally written in vernacular, and it is through that natural speed that the author can redirect the reader towards where they want them to go. I’d probably lump myself in this group, if I had to choose (sorry, Karate Sensei Dan, who taught me how to punch people really hard in 7th grade! Sumimasen!)

Ninjutsu is the shadow craft. While Kung Fu obfuscates its movements in exaggerated movement, Ninjutsu achieves the same principle by taking a step back. The primary weapons are diversion and tactical invisibility. But we should not forget that, like Karate, Ninjutsu is the art of the common farmer. Writing-wise, the tone must be practical and pragmatic, but the meaning itself is shrouded underneath its common garments. Metaphorical writers are true ninja warriors. Shakespeare is classic ninja. It took a few hundred years of reading his plays to figure out that he made a smelly pussy joke. James Joyce is so ninja, scholars couldn’t figure out that the plot to Finnegan’s wake until the 1990’s. That doesn’t mean the ninja prose has to be immediately baffling– I include Roberto Bolano’s Savage Detectives, and Mark Danielewski’s House of Leaves as modern ninja stories– the actual, purely implicit, plot of both don’t hit until well after the books themselves have left your hands.

Now I suppose the question remains, which dojo do you ascribe to? Do you need to pick one? In my view, modern authors need to be self-aware of how they write so that they can write to the best of their genre– that being being said, modern author’s are lucky to have such a rich tradition with which to engage with. Perhaps the best attitude to utilize this stupid fighting metaphor is to adopt the stance of a MMFA fighter and pick and choose which styles can best telegraph your brain’s guts against particular narrative issues. Need a hook? Karate. Want to explore the human experience? Kung fu. Want to world build within that issue? Jujitsu. Ride a voice into oblivion? Aikido. Want to impart wisdom or cleverness in a way that can be unpackaged overtime, like a good Arrested Development or Seinfeld episode? Ninjutsu. The modern novel calls for all of these things.

So put on your weighted clothes, work out in your gravity-fixed capsule, learn the art, and go Super Saiyan.

Pierre has his new book out! It’s called The Least of 99 Evils and you can get the ebook pre-order it here. More of a hardcopy kind of person? Get it in paperback here.

Also Nick gives Mortal Kombat a 5/5 rating so as to use their image. It’s a review! Of Mortal Kombat! Surprise!

Affecting Realism in Dialogue

People talk funny. I’m considering ending this post right here.

But that wouldn’t be fair. Writing dialogue in fiction is a tricky little monkey because it wears probably the most hats out of any of the devices in your narrative tool kit. Before we go on, take a moment to appreciate the image of a tricky monkey trying on a lot of hats. Heh. Rad.

Dialogue needs to exposit the plot without being too obvious, represent the atmosphere of the setting, as well as indicate a character’s specific values. Instinctual solutions to this triple-headed problem are often, ehm, shitty.

Kind of in the same way every novice thesbian reads every character in a British accent, the writer’s most common pratfall is raising the dialogue to give it a touch of misplaced class. “Stilted dialogue,” is probably a phrase you’ve read in a book or movie review and refers to the dialogue being stiff, overly-prosaic and “unnaturally formal.” It’s an easily justified solution– “My character’s a class act”– but it commonly bores the reader to hell and back. Worse, it’ll show your ignorance of how Victorian age gentlefolk actually talked because, let’s face it, you don’t know from personal experience, you just watched Pride and Prejudice and thought that’d it look smart on paper. It doesn’t. It’s boring and stupid. Moving on.

The other direction is one I’m more likely to head myself: utilizing dialect. There’s some pratfalls here, too. The most obvious one is looking like a bigot. Writing, say, a Chinese character in broken English would probably earn you a lot of hate. Another danger is steeping the dialogue in so much slang that the meaning is unrecognizable. There are exceptions to this, of course (Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange, for example), but generally speaking you still want the reader to understand what’s being telegraphed. A third danger is similar to the stilts– which is an over reliance on the same dialect. I have this problem that I’ll end up injecting southern drawls into all of my stories, regardless of genre. I’m working on it. But I opt for this direction more often than not because dialect is a means of relaying attitude–and yes, sometimes that attitude is hoity-toity high class Bourgeois bullshit– reflective of the character saying the words.

Over explicative dialogue is also a bummer. I call them “information dumps.” It’s when a character breaks down the plot without nuance and spoon feeds the reader “the grand reveal.” Sometimes it’s unavoidable. For readability and logistical reasons, eventually a character needs to squeal. I don’t always handle this well myself but studying hardboiled detective fiction has offered a blunt solution– make the Macguffin of the story the information itself. Noir fiction achieves this by making the primary action of the novel a series of interviews rife with exposition in a way that seems natural to the needs of the primary character. There’s a suggestion there that applies to all genres– if you need to exposit some plot, enact an interrogation of some kind. Is it a perfect solution? Well, nothing’s gonna be, but as far as my money’s worth squeezing information out of a character tracks more naturally than unsolicited explanations for what’s going on.

Between the tasks of characterizing, expositing and reflecting the setting through dialogue is a golden opportunity to triple down on all three. It requires doing something rather unintuitive at first. Go off track. Instead of having a character simply stating their goal or the nature of their world (which I understand, sometimes ya gotta do), have them fixate momentarily on something non-sequitor. This loop around the immediate problem at hand provides a subtle glance at the setting while keying the reader into how a character thinks– while still participating with plot driven dialogue. Let me dummy up an example:

“Jess, we got to get goin’.”

“The flowers haven’t blossomed yet. Why haven’t the flowers blossomed yet, Jake?”

“Jess? We need to leave, now-like.”

In three short lines of dialogue we know that Jake is urgently concerned with the current setting. Maybe he’s a protecter type, maybe he’s just anxious, but he’s moving the story along. We know that Jess is perceptive, curious and introspective. We know that the flowers haven’t blossomed which makes us feel like the world that they inhabit has gone wrong. It goes from plot and setting to characterization and atmosphere and back to plot.

The reason why deviation coupled with dialect works as a means to express dialogue is that it’s how we naturally speak. We don’t necessarily write the way we talk– except for me and it’s weird to talk to me in person– but we should aim to come as close as we possibly can while still serving the purposes of dialogue. Dialect works because it grounds us to a particular lexicon and style. Deviation works because real life conversations often occur with both parties speaking around each other’s point (I hate to bring up Hills Like White Elephants again, but that’s the perfect example of this). How many times have you yourself brought up something entirely off topic in order to express your own interests? If you can find a way to instill that sentiment while preserving the alternative talking points (and excise the social obligations of “I’m sorry, this is off topic, but…”) while still sharing a conversation that explicates, characterizes, and reflects atmosphere, you might just make your piece feel a little bit more real. And a spoonful of realism makes the plot go down that much easier.

Fuck stilts.

Tale as Old as Time

I haven’t seen the remake of Beauty and the Beast. Not for any moralistic reasons (although if there was one, it’d be that it’s not gay enough) but because movies are expensive until they settle into the more financially accessible venues of second-run theaters.

But I will say that Beauty and the Beast is my favorite non-The Great Mouse Detective animated film Disney has produced. While The Little Mermaid has perhaps the most perfectly paced story of the 90’s Disney Renaissance (because I guess we just throw that word now like rice at a wedding), it was Beauty that fully captured a full spectrum of perspectives– think how many songs are actually sung by Belle? Or the Beast? The animated film is fully fleshed out emotionally by outsiders examining the simple love plot at the heart of the story.

That’s the immediate reason why I’d say Beauty is superior to a lot of other Disney films, but there’s some folkloric magic inside that movie that isn’t so apparent– and it’s an element that connects it to Disney’s earlier ventures of animating established fairy tales:

Beauty and the Beast is Blue Beard.

For all you cultureless heathens out there, Blue Beard is the fairy tale of a young woman who marries a count or whatever. He’s a rich dude with a blue beard who’s had many wives over the years, all of whom have disappeared under rather dubious circumstances.

Fun fact: while blue beards existed in the way-way back, red flags did not.

Anywhatsit, this gal is given everything she desires– nice clothes, good food, bitchin’ jewelry, radical skateboarding half-pipes, you name it– with the one exception that she couldn’t enter this one door. After some filler, you better know that she opens that door. Inside is all of the dismembered corpses of Blue Beard’s former spouses. Blue Beard catches her in the act and draws his sword, about to slice his young wife into skirt steak– but oh! She protests! And depending on the version either her brother or some strapping young knight hears her screaming and comes along and stabs Blue Beard until he’s nothing but pudding. It’s a happy, gruesome ending.

The Disney version is arguably a little different.

The basic buildings blocks are all still there though: a pretty, possibly naïve, young girl is imprisoned in a castle (I’m not even going to make the grim comparison with marriage here), she’s given every comfort personified furniture can give her (“Be… our… GUEST…”), but she’s forbidden to enter a particular room (and when she does, Big Bad Beastie Boy flies into a rage. Just not a decapitation-happy one).

The deviations from the fairy tale are actually pretty clever: the forbidden room doesn’t contain a bunch of corpses, but a wilting magical rose symbolic of Beast Bro’s incapability to love. And there’s some overlap there with the rudimentary tale– a room full of dead wives sends a pretty direct message that Blue Beard has the wrong idea of what it’s like to commit. But the greater idea is that this is about control– both Blue Beard and Beasty Bitty Boom Boom are angry because a woman went against their wishes. The former reacts violently, whereas the latter learns how to let go– ultimately letting Belle leave the castle.

Aww.

The shining knight in armor also turns out to be a huge piece of douche-gristle who assumes the maiden needs saving and attempts to kill the monster despite the lady’s protestations. It’s just a great piece of contextual fairy tale irony. Gaston dies a fairly gruesome death (for a kid’s movie) while the monster gets the girl. That’d be like if Grendel killed Beowulf and hooked up with a Scandinavian princess on Beowulf’s grave.

It’s also a good study of how to take basic storytelling principles and turn them on their head. Fairytales have rules to them– they had to, because they were a spoken tradition sang drunkenly at parties. Rules are a lot easier to remember than details (which you can just make up on the spot) and Beauty‘s an excellent example of changing around a few details to better suit the story for a modern audience, while keeping the primary code intact.

And you might be saying, “The Little Mermaid was a Hans Christian Anderson fairy tale and they changed a lot of stuff!”

To which I would say, “While that is true, Anderson was more of a Victorian-aged author of short-stories that resembled fairy tales, but didn’t have quite the spoken traditionalism behind his work– which isn’t a bad thing. He did what Disney did. I would also like to mention that Anderson’s The Little Mermaid culminates in the mermaid committing suicide and, while that’s totally metal for a story about fish-women, there wasn’t any room for Anderson’s knack for sadism during Bush’s America. Now please leave, Straw Man, I’m sure you have to go startle some birds off a cornfield.”

Beauty and the Beast is just a solid example of spinning an old story in a way that’s easily digestible. It’s able to sublimate Blue Beard‘s more gruesome details with romantic flourishes such that it becomes something almost unrecognizable from it’s predecessor. And that’s essentially the goal of writing fiction, isn’t it? Finding opportunities for novelty in a story that’s been told a million times over? In that way, despite being a story about some hot nerd nursing a burning loin for a bear-demon, Beauty and the Beast succeeds creatively.

Could be gayer, though.

S-Town and Tangential Storytelling

Spoiler alert for the podcast S-Town. I ruin it.

So if you party like I do then you’ve already binged the entirety of NPR’s S-Town podcast on a Saturday night while sharing a fifth of cheap Scotch with your best friend, a crayon drawing of a sad woman on a napkin.

Anyway.

S-Town is a fantastic journey revolving around the troubled redneck genius John B. McClemore– and during those revolutions, a layer from the small town in rural Alabama is shaved off and inspected thoroughly, revealing that every inch of this place has John’s DNA somehow embedded into it, even well after his suicide. It’s a mind-blowing piece of investigative, empathetic journalism.

And there’s a popular theory that John himself “authored” the narrative of this story from the very beginning and there’s a lot of tempting evidence that this is the case. Too many metaphors make too much sense. You have the “null set” of the maze which not only summarizes John’s philosophy on his own life (there’s no solution and yet you’re trapped in an experience of convoluted twists and turns and frustrations) but also that of his thoughts on climate change (no solution to the biggest problems that plague us)– the pessimism is almost redundant. There’s never any solution, just problems, of which John bitches about constantly. Brian Reed even suspects that John had set up the “null-set” on purpose early on in the series. And that carries an implicative weight to the other puzzles John has proposed: namely, the murder that wasn’t a murder and his hidden stashes of gold that might not actually be buried. Problems without solutions. Wild goose chases. Geese chases? Never mind.

There are other metaphors, of course. One of the most striking is how John gilds a dime to give to Brian using potassium cyanide. He ingests the same chemical later to kill himself. The beautifully grim metaphor, if there is one, is that John was symbolically turned to gold on the inside. (Sidebar: it could very well be that this is the metaphorical gold that John has sent Travis to look for– not material wealth, but the appreciation of their friendship once he’s departed. But that rings a little too smug and cold, even for John. It sounds too much like every high-schooler’s threat “you’ll miss me when I’m gone.”) The gold metaphor comes full circle when it’s revealed that John’s other preferred gilding practices likely incurred gradually detrimental brain damage similar to the Mad Hatter’s disease.

So did John just use Brian Reed to enact a dramatic suicide note? My take? Not really. You’d have to discount the tireless work Brian and his team did to find this extremely personal narrative, slogging through hundreds of hours of audio. S-Town is a testament to how important editing is– how essential scene selection can be for an emotional payoff. John was a man who rambled, rambled coherently maybe, but shot off from one subject to the next until it inevitably spiraled into climate change and the doom of his shit town, Woodstock.

John also thought in metaphorical concepts. He’s a clock-fixer-upper, it makes sense that he could create complicated stories with people acting like the cogs that turn against each other… but again I feel like that’s a disservice to the amount of work put into this thing and the narrative constraint they put upon it. S-Town could have been many things, if based on John’s metaphors alone. But everyone involved in production was smart about it and they made it into a journalistic novel not unlike Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood.

And I salute them for a storytelling strategy that often goes unappreciated– that of constant deviation and tangential leaps. I think, because John was who he was, this was almost inevitable. Well, that and the fact that the first story (the non-murder) would have rang kind of flat if not for Reed’s post-mortem investigation into the intrigues of Woodstock.

If you think about it, the narrative goes from hanging out with John (noting his pierced nipples), to the murder investigation, to the suicide, to the familial troubles of John’s family which branches off into two distinct parallel perspectives (Travis and Rita, the former of which is now searching for gold, the latter of which tried to get those nipple rings as a keepsake from the coroner), both of which leading towards contacting the lawyer and town clerk (Faye), which opens a lot of questions which leads towards John’s perhaps most intimate friend and the explanation of the “flagellation” ritual of piercing his nipples repeatedly. It could be that I’m bad at summarizing things, but I think I got the basic story down.

I’m using the nipple ring motif because it’s something that first appears as a random, almost unnecessary detail that keeps returning as a slightly more relevant (even contentious) detail before the symbolic weight of the piercings are finally revealed. It’s also the perfect example of a little quirk that binds two disparate narratives together. Of all the legal conflicts between Travis and Rita, it’s the nipple rings that apparently affect both on a solely emotional level. And for Travis, the explanation brought us back to John’s workshop, practicing their “Church” service, one of the last images we have of John in S-Town‘s narrative. It initially came off as thematically forced to thread the story along before Reed and his team finally let the last Tetris block fall into place.

The art of tangential storytelling is that if you take enough left turns, you’ll eventually end up where you started, but, like all stories, you’ll have gained perspective. By the end of S-Town we’ve gained the perspectives of many people who’ve interacted with John, but in a sad way, once the series is over, we’re back to a world where John doesn’t exist and are forced to ask the question, am I the better for knowing this man? S-Town (or Woodstock), too, like the gloomy protagonist always insists, is more or less the same town it always was, minus an eccentric that many of the townsfolk preferred not to know. Are they the better for having this series released?

The latter is the kind of question I can’t answer definitively. I think exploitation was avoided as much as it could’ve been. Not that it might matter to the people of Woodstock. “Fuck it,” is the motto for telling everything upfront, after all. In that, I feel, there is some elemental truth of honesty. The tattoo artist is upfront about his racism and Reed, while hiding the fact that he’s married to a black woman and is Jewish, accepts that and moves on to other topics of discussion. He does it without necessarily demonizing the guy. That was a lateral move of empathy, uncomfortable though it may have been, on Reed’s part to keep on digging for the story– and he found it (summarily: John would get a tattoo every time the shop was in the red to give them enough business to get ’em back to black). Effectively Reed piloted a narrative into a crash-landing in shark-infested waters and made the story about the sharks and where they swim. But they’re not as scary as you’ve come to believe. That’s the kind of opportunity that this kind of story mechanic allows for.

The structure of tangential storytelling is more intuitive than you might think. After all, the recipe for the second act of a hardboiled detective novel or police procedural TV show is rooted in the act of interviewing people. This is what translates so elegantly to the podcast format of S-Town– Reed acts as detective running down leads on his deceased friend and picking up common threads between seemingly unrelated perspectives. We see those interactions recorded as they happen and we love it. It’s why you’ll remember scenes from All the President’s Men if not the actual newspaper article that broke Watergate. Just like John’s riddle of where he left his gold, it’s the journey that’s more important than the outcome.

Which might be trite but nonetheless true.

I suppose it’s because that journey uses every tangent as a discursive opportunity to explore an element of John’s life or otherwise his impact of the people he left behind– and their lives in S-Town. To bring up my favorite book on earth, The Savage Detectives, Roberto Bolaño employs the extreme method of using 52 narrators to account for the actions and whereabouts of two scummy poets over the course of several years. The plot of the novel is entirely implicative, obscured by the dozens of stories people tell, not only about the poets, but about their own secrets, troubles, impulses, mental illnesses, historical fascinations and racial biases. It tells of the evasive duo, but not without letting in the reader about their own life. Likewise, John B. McClemore is sort of a magnet thrown into a mine. He’s always at the center of things, but everything/one that sticks to him is also fascinating.

Which nullifies the “null-set” paradigm of reading S-Town. At least on a cynical level– I doubt that John’s dream of a suicide note would include intimate details about his rhinoceros-skinned nipples. It includes everybody he’s known, and while he’s had his own time to devise his time on earth, it’s the people that he’s interacted with that get to spin his legend. And everyone’s got a different outlook on the guy. He’s been many things. But there are common threads of kindness, pettiness, embarrassment, cowardice, success and failure…

And through these many lenses we get the character of John from the outside looking inward.

Object Permanence and Logical Sequencing

Once upon a time my super happy, super pregnant Intro to Creative Writing Fiction teacher had a baby fall out of her and had to take some time off. We finished off the year with a super sardonic, grim-faced teaching fellow named Jen.

Jen brought something to our attention that I’d never considered before. You know the phenomena of how once you learn a new word, you can’t help but notice it everywhere? Or like how I always see the ghost of Mary Tyler Moore trying to untie a knot in a yo-yo in the corner of my eyes? Everywhere I fucking go? The point is this concept is a universal plague.

It’s the lack of object permanence in writing.

Simple concept, right? It’s one of the first “skills” you come to learn as a pathetic little baby through the repetitive game of peek-a-boo. During that period of development, one comes to understand that a person or thing still exists despite the object being out of view. It’s a thing we take for granted until we have to create a written narrative that guides a reader as smoothly as possible through a sequence of events.

I’m talking about how a character will, say, fill a glass of water from the faucet early in a scene and then, shortly after, punches somebody in the face without ever mentioning the water again. Did the character drink it? Did he put the glass down? Or did he punch someone in the face with the glass of water in his hand? Another example: “Kelly lit her pipe. Kelly took a bite of cereal.” Did she eat the cereal with the pipe in her mouth? Stop laughing in the back, this is serious. If she did, how? These are the kinds of questions you don’t want your reader to be asking.

So just go ahead and answer the questions before they’re questions, dig?

Ground the scene in action. Have the character take a sip– or, have him deliberately not take a sip of water, before clearly stating that the glass goes back on the table, or smashes to the ground or whatever. It doesn’t matter just as long as you’re telling the reader what’s happening with the inventory you’ve introduced on the page. This creates a wide variety of opportunities to do a bit of characterization because it forces you– and the reader– to understand why the character made a choice and what values are inherent in that choice. Is Kelly the kind of slob who’s figured out a way to eat cereal while smoking a pipe? Is Beef McSweat the kind of guy who puts his glass down before throwing ‘bows? Or does he smash it on the floor?

It’s also part of logically sequencing a scene so as to build tension and demonstrate a rising conflict. If you were to study the amazing opening scene of Inglourious Basterds, you’ll notice that meticulous attention is paid to the objects on set. In the linked scene above, it’s primarily LaPadite’s pipe and Landa’s glass of milk that get the primary focus. You’ll notice how when the characters handle those items, it speaks to their values– LaPadite nervously chews on the pipe while Landa joyfully sips his milk while discussing social Darwinistic metaphors. Even how LaPadite passes the glass of milk slowly over to Landa suggests that he is hesitant to give Landa what he wants, but he will.

And that kind of descriptive, implicit action is only effective when attention is paid to the treatment of those objects– there isn’t a single shot in which LaPadite’s pipe is out of place. You see him put the pipe in his mouth. It doesn’t go back on the table or out of his mouth without you seeing him remove his pipe. You don’t see him light the match, but you do hear the sound design of a match being lit before it cuts to him lighting his pipe. Likewise, you don’t see Landa shift in his chair at first, but you do hear the noise his chair makes. This level of detail is why movies have script supervisors: consistency, context and logic that seamlessly flows through dozens of shots and probably hundreds of takes.

When you don’t have that kind of anal retentive attention to detail, you’ll find that objects will disappear out of characters’ hands like electrons dipping in and out of existence like in the Heisenberg Principle. Even if it’s on a subconscious level, this’ll force the reader out of the story. I see a lot of lists of actions that are not correlated to each other, divided by dialogue. And making it a linear sequence is too simple: choose a single object and a single action responding to that object. There will be a reaction.

Paying close attention to this will also show you what’s unnecessary through sheer tyranny of effort. Did your character really need to hold a dodge ball at that moment in time? No? Can you make it fit? No? Ditch it. A lot of writers will fill in blank space with what they just did/ are doing/ will do/ shit they like. Some of the time it works. Sometimes it doesn’t. How many times have you written a character smoking a cigarette because that’s what you would do? Maybe they would, maybe they wouldn’t. But make sure if a habit hasn’t been established, make it a big deal by paying attention to where the butt goes after it’s spent.

The zealous approach to object permanence in writing is to ground the surroundings to such a fine detail that it becomes boring minutiae. That isn’t what I’m suggesting you do. Writing a paragraph about folding laundry, followed by another paragraph on washing dishes, followed by another paragraph on alphabetizing the sections of the newspapers before dropping them into the recycling bin is a waste of studious talent. (Unless, I guess, you’re doing something like Murakami.)

Point is, you’re not supposed to notice the movements of the object in hand at first– which only happens if you complete the interaction with said object. We might know on an instinctual level what LaPadite passing the milk across the table means when we see it, but not on an intellectual level until after the scene and whole movie is over. You’re supposed to take it for granted– which is why it’s so easy to overlook the absence of object consistency in the editing passes.

So before you become a lice-ridden, self-conscious creature, here are some situations when you don’t really need to keep follow-through in mind, while still maintaining consistency: when you are summarily describing events (“Dude ate breakfast. Dude left for work.” We don’t need to see him eat breakfast in a play by play.); if it’s habitual (“Dude lit the 21st cigarette of the day.” We assume he does something with the butts.); if actions are actually implied between the action and context (“Dude cracked a beer and talked my ear off for twenty minutes about steel beams and grays stealing his skin. Dude cracked another beer…” It’s implied that he finished the first one.)

It might sound like a cynical perspective to say that all human beings are materialistic– but we’d be simple monkeys without the tools we learned to make in way-way-back. We attach meaning to the things we hold through the actions we make with them. A hammer hammers nails. It only makes sense that a hammer needs to be in the hands of a carpenter while he’s a-nailing, instead of his lunch pail.

Unless you’re being ironic.

Big Bang: Action and Reaction

My brother recently posted a link to the wiki page of Reflexivity, which is a pretty fascinating social concept if you want to get into it. In short:

Reflexivity refers to circular relationships between cause and effect. A reflexive relationship is bidirectional with both the cause and the effect affecting one another in a relationship in which neither can be assigned as causes or effects.

It made me reflect on why a lot of my earlier writing was stagnant and I boiled it down to the fact that the story itself wouldn’t move. Characters would respond to their own agendas, instead of each other’s. Or worse, they wouldn’t do anything at all, just idly soaking up the setting I’d provided until something dramatic happened to them. The story would muddle into itself, pooling into an incomprehensible, too-clever-for-its-own-good gooey mess.

The thing I always try to remind myself is to root the story in action. Simple motto, sure, but it’s a surprisingly non-instinctual one for those of us who shoved our brains into the English major– you spend more time figuring out what something means instead of why it works.

By bringing everything down to the world of action, the story becomes clearer because it doesn’t get bogged down in descriptive language or exposition– you can always fill in the stylistic flourishes later. It also forces the writer to respond to each action with a reaction from another character in play– or the setting itself (man punches wall, light fixture falls on his head)– and then forces the instigator to respond to the situation they’ve created.

Which provides an excellent opportunity for characterization. Actions, after all, speak louder than words, even if they’re subtle. Compare “Mr. Beemouth looked dismissive…” with “Mr. Beemouth cleaned his ear with his pinky finger and examined it while Ms. Rawwwwwk spoke.”

Some famous schmuck said a long time ago that the hardest part of writing fiction is making the character leave the room. That’s a question of motivation which is a tricky thing to figure out in the drafting stages. Thinking in terms of action makes that problem a little easier to solve. What are they responding to? Personally, I’m a fan of pro-active characters, idiot savants, who create the problem themselves and complicate it by attempting to solve it (see: Fish Fox Boys) or characters like Sam Spade or Phillip Marlowe, who complicate the story by aggressively hammering themselves into it and then catching what shakes loose in the chaos (see: Muddy Sunset).

To bring up a modern filmic example of muddied and clear action sequences, look no further than the final fight scenes of The Avengers and Captain America: Civil War. In The Avengers, the scene becomes confusing the moment the army of alien invaders come on stage. The action becomes hard to track– the plane takes a hit from a passing enemy and has to crash land, Iron man shoots a bunch of missiles and a bunch of the aliens explode, and then does more of the same, yada yada yada… it’s hard to describe, in part because of modern shooting and editing practices, but I feel it’s because the actual cause and effect of the battle becomes obscured in its vainglorious attempt to overwhelm the audience (which isn’t to say that large-scale battle scenes are worthless– Kurosawa figured out how to lineate the sequences such that a scene could be personal while still pulling off gigantic fight scenes).

You compare that to the final fight scene in Civil War? Shiiiieeeet. Every blow is accounted for. There’s more emotional weight to it and while part of that is the viewer’s internal conflict watching two beloved characters beat the Christ out of each other, that weight is telegraphed by pure, violent action– with almost no atmosphere or dialogue. It’s just action met with reaction, stripped down the the bare essentials. And it tells a better story, I think, because it follows a logical sequence.

Pierre Manchot

Tag: writing advice