Tag Archives: Writing

Thoughts on Sequels

As I have been working editing a sequel novel my thoughts have turned to the tricky nature of sequels in general. There is no place more in love with sequels that Hollywood. Given the sums of money on the line, both for production and potential profit, the idea of returned to a tried and true success if often one that movie producers cannot resist. Yet time and time again the sequels that are produced often are disappointments both commercially and as entertainment. Publishing has a similar thought relationship, albeit though with greater success than feature film in producing satisfying sequels projects. What is it about sequels that makes them so challenging?

The first impulse when a sequel is produced it simply to copy the parent project. You need look no further afield than Jawsand Jaws 2for an example that is nearly a platonic ideal of this principal. This tends to fail because what made the parent project so fresh and innovative simply cannot be fresh a second time around. We have literally seen it before and the desire for new ground, new stuff often overpowers the desire for a repeat performance. A successful sequel must break new ground, giving the audience something that they did not know that they wanted.

It is also possible to be too new and break so afield from the previous works that the audience simply has no interest and this new thing you have sold them dressed up as something it is not. This issue happens far less often than the rote copying of the previous work but it can be seen in Halloween III, which ignored the previous two films of the franchise in an attempt to establish the title as part of an anthology brand. The filmmakers wanted a wholly new concept but the audience wanted more of a slasher wearing a painted over William Shatner mask,

The third major way a sequel can go astray is to destroy the emotional investment the audience paid with the previous works. When someone truly loves a piece of narrative work they have infused that project with serious emotional capitol, paying with their apprehension and their concern for the stakes that characters faced. The emotional profit that they reap from the experience exceeds the tension that they endured during the narrative. Some sequels, in an attempt to break free of old patterns and find that elusive new ground, undo the rewards from the previous encounters and in effect tell the audience that they had been suckers for caring about the previous outcomes. A perfect cinematic example of this is Alien 3. Aliensa nearly perfect sequel that blended the established character with new situations quickly became a favorite but for many its sequel, Alien 3is thought of with scorn and hatred, Some people even insist that Alien 3ruined for them the previous film Aliens.I believe those harsh reactions are a direct result of the filmmakers, unintentionally mind you, telling the audience that they had been fools to emotionally invest in the well-being of Hicks and Newt. Every erg of emotional energy spent caring about those characters; feeling scared for those characters, cheering their survivals had been a con. Killing those characters in an off hand manner devalued the story of Aliensand naturally devalued any emotions wasted on Hicks and Newt.

Creating a successful sequel requires navigates these three major pitfalls, you cannot simply copy what transpired before, you cannot venture too far from what has been established, and you must not negate the emotional investment made in the previous projects.

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Speeding Along

It’s a little shocking to me just how quickly the revisions to my novel are proceeding. The first act has been corrected and locked, the second act has been turned over to my sweetie-wife for her excellent review and I started in on the third act this week.

Most people write in a three-act structure but lately I have been experimenting with a five-act format. I like how it breaks the story down into smaller elements and that the elements themselves have in general a better defined nature than establishment, conflict, resolution. So even after my third act is fixed that still leaves two more to complete.

I am also a bit surprised by how quickly the story is progressing. The nature of the plot and of the story, those are separate elements in my opinion, caused me a bit of a concern that it might begin rather slowly and beginnings are so terrible important. In fact when I wrote the first draft it originally had a prologue and it was the type that promised drama and action for later in the story but I have no awakened from my dread and I am cutting the prologue. It looks to me that the character and his troubles start at the opening scenes and the prologue was simply a mistake.

(Of course I still may be deluding myself, but that is what beta-readers are for.)

I have also received word that an editorial team at a comedic SF anthology likes my writing and have invited me to submit to their next anthology. That is very flattering and their submission window is still open. The question is can I compose something that is funny and within the tight but not impossible deadline? Comedy is very much outside of my skill set and my comfort zone and yet I am always advising fellow writers that they should attempt things outside of their comfort zone. I have a couple of ideas, but for me the forging of ideas into plot and story is the most challenging aspect of creation.

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No Honest Critique…

… Can be wrong.

This is something I say quite often at the writers group that I attend and I fully believe that. Of course one of the key aspects is that it must be an honest critique, but that is neither here nor there for today’s essay. What does it mean when a critique or interpretation seems so very at odds with a common view of the work?

For example that was an on-line dust up some time back over the SF/Horror film They Live. Quite a few Alt-Right types were very adamant that the aliens in the movie were a metaphor for a world wide Jewish conspiracy and that the story in fact validated the alt-right and other anti-Semites terrible worldview. John Carpenter, who wrote the screenplay and directed the film, insisted that the metaphor was for capitalism, conservatism, and specifically Ronald Reagan’s brand of political thought. In the on-line postings we have clear authorial intent but presuming the Alt-Right and other are not lying, how can I suggest that their interpretation is correct?

The key to understanding this is that communication is never as simple as one agent creates a message and transmits it to another agent who then receives that intended message. The process is more like the sending agent encodes a message, transmits it, the receiver decodes the message and then looks to understand it, that encoding/decoding transformation it critical in how a message is interpreted.

In the case of They Live, Carpenter used alien to encode his metaphor but in the decoding process everyone uses their own set of symbols and lived experiences, including everything that they have been taught or believe to be true, as a lens to color the transmission. For the Alt-Right types that can include the anti-Semitic garbage in their own operating system, hence they decoded a message that was anti-capitalist and anti-conservative into a narrative palatable to their own prejudices. Their critique and analysis, if honest, is correct for them but only because their decoding process seriously distorts reality.

So when there is an interpretation of a work that is significantly out of step with both authorial intent, when it is know, and the general interpretation that outliers conclusions says much more about the filters and lens of the critiquing agency than it does about the work itself.

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Sympathy for the Devil

I have seen a few articles recently expressing how the villain of Marvel’s Black Panther is truly not a villain but a victim. These articles often call for Eric ‘Killmonger’ to be regarded with sympathy or even argue that the character may be justified in his objectives and methods.

(Minor spoilers for Black Panther will follow.)

I think in part this point of view is easier to arrive at if you are starting from a life history that echoes may of the ones that Killmonger experienced. (That is not to say you share the regal blood history but rather the one of prejudice and abandonment.) Over all having some sympathy for the antagonist is not a bad thing. An antagonist with a complex and compelling backstory is often relatable leading to a richer enjoyment of any narrative and often illuminating aspect of the human condition. There are also time when a less nuanced villain is required, when the character presenting the threat is more like an invincible force that a person with flaws and motivations. Killmonger is clearly deeply drawn character with very understandable motivations.

The fact that his motivations are understandable is not the same as saying that they are excusable. It is possible to understand with condoning and in fact that difficult balance is critical both as someone experiencing the world and as someone creating a fictional one.

Among the many non-fiction books I have read there have been several on the subject of serial killers. The history, study, and nature of serial killers is something I find fascinating and a subject that is often portrayed quite poorly in cinema. Serial killers do not simply wake up one day and start killing without ‘reason.’ (Reason here is a very loose term because what is compelling to them is often incomprehensible to those removed from their history.)

As the character, and monster Hannibal, said in The Silence of the Lambs, ‘Billy was not born a monster, but made one through years of systematic abuse.’ Is this not exactly the case with Eric Killmonger? Where Buffalo Bill’s abuse was heaped upon him by people close to him, and if you read about actual serial killers there is always a pattern of deep and prolonged abuse in their formative years, Killmonger literally was abused by the systems around him, both American and Wakandan.

I find Killmonger’s motivation fully understandable and I have sympathy for the character, but we must not confuse sympathy with excuse. Murder to sate a psychological wound is not admirable, not when performed serial killers, abused villains like Killmonger, and justifiably terrified ones like Magneto in the X-Men franchise. This to me is one of the defining difference between a hero and a villain; chasing their objectives a hero has lines that they will not cross while the villain is willing to make anyone suffer, no horror is too great, and their ends justify all means.

Killmonger was not wrong in the evils he saw in the world, but he was too blind to see that he himself had become that same evil. The character may not have understood the historical significance of one of his lines but the writer/director Ryan Coogler certainly understood the British Imperial echoes of ‘The sun will never set on the Wakandan Empire.’

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Watch Out for Prologues

One of the common pieces of advices heard around writing group and seminars is don’t writer prologues.

Prologues are short bits of narrative places before the opening scenes of the novel and there is great debate about their utility. In my opinion there are time when a prologue is required if you want the reader to fully understand the nature of your piece. Like SF Author Nancy Kress I think there is an implicit promise made to the reader at the start of any story and if you violate that promise you are likely to have an upset reader. The prologue can help ensure that the tone and expectations of the piece are well established before the meat of the plot has begun to unfold.

Think about the book, and even the television series, A Game of Thrones. Both start with a prologue where we follow a small band of ranger north of the wall encountering the first stirrings of the army of the dead. Except for the execution scene in chapter one we do not see these characters again. They play no major part in the plot and have no deep familial connections to any of the main characters, but this prologue is essential. Without that prologue we would not know that this is a world of magic and zombies. We are well aware of the danger that so many characters will spend so much time dismissing.

Too often this is not how writers try to use a prologue, but rather they often take a short cut into one of two broad uses.

World-Building;

The prologue will try to lay out too much of the history of the world, to give too much context for the viewer or reader and in the end bore them with a history lesson without emotional meaning. This is very tempting and it should be avoided. The real craft of world-building is laying the foundations just before you actually need them. Sprinkle them throughout the work in pieces to fall into place as the narrative unfolds both enlightening the reader and explaining the world but without stopping to lecture. This is is very difficult to do and so many people try to take a short cut and dump this stuff in the most critical place in the book, the beginning.

A Fake Action Opening:

Attempting to follow the advice to always open with action, writers will craft a battle oriented prologue, something composed action, daring, and high stakes, but all too often that is followed by a lack luster first chapter. Many times this will be the inverse of the World-Building prologue because the first chapter will be extensive world-building and the author has hoped that the prologue and its action will carry the reader through the tedious establishment and info-dumps of a poor first chapter.

In both of these case the prologue is a bandage on the more serious issue, either a lack luster opening or less than stellar world-building. The answer is not a prologue but fixing the root cause of the trouble.

There are good causes for prologue but make sure yours is not trying to fix a more fundamental trouble.

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And the Draft is Done

Well, technically I completed the first draft of my latest novel a week ago, but only now am I talking about it here.

This is the next novel in my military/sf adventure series. My agent is shopping the first book in the series and I went ahead and produced the second. The title and synopsis is of course under wraps but it deals with an American officer serving in the 3rd European Union’s interstellar forces. I refer to the setting of these stories as Nationalized Space as this is an imagined future where mankind spreads out into the cosmos without ever having unified. In addition it is a future where sometime in the early 21st century the United States took a wrong turn, never recovered, and ended up a minor power. After all, all empires fade.

Now that the draft is done, currently at 99,000 words, I am going to take a few weeks off from working on the novel. First I am going to play on my new Xbox One S and lose a lot of matches of Player’s Unknown Battlegrounds. Second I am going to work on some short pieces, including trying my hand at a pulp styled adventure, but in short story form, and then after I have achieved some distance I will return to the novel for the revision processes.

I’m confident that the book has no major flaws that will require a complete rewrite, but I have been wrong on that before. I anticipate that the revision will be principally tightening, clarifying, and of course hunting and killing the dreaded spelling and grammar flaws.

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Breaking Clichés

I recently got some feedback on a short story from a top editor and of course the piece is going back into the shop to utilize their comments. However one of the compliments I received was on using a clichéd opening that worked in spite of the cliché. The story began with the character waking up.

If you do not write much or do not hangout with writers learning their craft you may not know just how often this opening starts off stories that fail to deliver. It has been theorized that this opening is so prevalent among novice writing because it mirrors the creative process. The writer doesn’t know how to start the story and begin at the start of the day, with their main character coming out of a slumber. This theory is further reinforced if the character awakens to a white room, the white space very reminiscent of the blank white paper in a typewriter. (And that gives you a sense of how old this cliché is.)

In art any rule can broken so when it is right to start a story with this tired trope?

I think the critical question is what woke the character up? The story I got the positive comment on had as a major theme sleeping dreams and in order to get the character as close as possible to their dreams I needed them to start asleep, but that alone would not have been enough to break the cliché. In addition to the theme, the character is awoken by bad news. In others words this was not just any random awakening, there was the commentary on the dream and an immediate obstacle that presented a dramatic need to my character.

If you are tempted to having your story start with the character coming awake my first advice would be, look for another point in the tale with greater dramatic impact, but if you cannot leap past the moment make sure it fits thematically and has dramatic stakes straight away.

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A Bonanza of Movies

I must say that looking forward over the next few weeks my troubles appear to be finding enough time to see all the movies I want to see.

Next weekend The Shape of Water opens and I am both a fan of the Universal Gill-Man movies and Del Torro, so this movie if aimed right at me. The week after that of course if the opening of Star Wars: The Last Jedi and I thoroughly enjoyed The Force Awakens so this one is also on my radar. (I also have no doubts that JJ Abrams is a much better fit with Star Wars than he is with Star Trek.)

On Dec 13th I will be joining a bunch of fans for a sold out screening of 1980’s musical fantasy Xanadu. (Now this film is really a bad movie. The script is terrible and apparently was subject to daily rewrites but there is an emotional core that resonates with me making it a personal favorite. See you can love art that is not well executed. All that matters is that it speaks to you.)

Coco has opened and that is a Pixar movie that has really grabbed my interest. In addition to that I admit a more than passing interest in the latest entry in the Saw franchise, Jigsaw, even though I have never seen any movie of that series. (It’s the directors, they are talented and the three previous films the brothers have all worked for me.)

Sadly this is also the time of year when I am working 10 hours a day helping people get the insurance that they want and that leaves limited hours for going out.

Still, no complaints. Life is good and on the 15th my latest short story hits publication on the web so while I am tired I am happy.

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Revisiting my Youth

So, as I have mentioned the notion has been bouncing around my head to try my hand a pulp style adventure. I have received some good advice that perhaps I should start with a short story first and then perhaps attempt a novel.

A few weeks ago my sweetie-wife and I was walking near the Antique Row area of Adam’s Avenue in San Diego and as we passed the Adam’s Avenue Bookstore, a treasure horde of used books and my favorite used bookstore in town, I popped inside to see if they had any of the old Doc Savage novels.

They had one: Fear Cay.

I bought it, and bought another book that my sweetie-wife wanted and we headed home. Now when I was a young teenager I discovered the Doc Savage novels shortly after discovering science-fiction in general. These were pulp adventures written in the 30’s about the superhuman hero/adventurer Doc Savage and his team of five fantastic men as they spanned the globe fighting evil. There are more than 180 of these novels and I think I have read maybe twenty, but my memory is one of fun, adventure, and a pseudo-supernatural mystery that always turned out to have a scientific explanation. Really just the sort of thing I am thinking about exploring. Armed with my pulp novel I settled in to read Fear Cay.

Wow. The prose is terrible.

The adventure unfolds pretty much as I remember most of these adventure unfolding, but I had no recollection at all just how clumsy, expository, and plain bad the actual writing was. I have worked my way through this book but I can attest that it was not a smooth and effortless journey, Certainly I do not want to imitate the prose style of something like this, only the atmosphere of grand adventure. I have a short story coming together for my own pulp hero and after I finish work on my novel that will be by next project.

As an aside, apparently writer/Director Shawn Black (Iron Man 3, Lethal Weapon, etc.) if planning on making a live action, period set, Doc Savage movie staring Dwayne Johnson as Doc. That should be interesting.

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My Take on the Pulps

When I was 12 or 13 I discovered the Doc Savage novels. These were pulp adventures from the 1930s with the lead character Clark ‘Doc’ Savage and his troop is talented men that crisscrossed the globe fighting evil. For a time these were quite popular and a team of writers working under a single name churned out loads of books. There was a 1975 film, but it was lackluster and gathered no attention.

Lately it has been circling my thoughts what would it be like to write one of these pulp adventures set in the here and now? (Or at the very least a parallel here and now.) Now I can see there are people writing pulps today but they are primarily set in the 1930 and that is not what I am thinking about. I also see some novels pushed as having a pulp-like quality but in my opinion that do not quite hit that mark and are distinctly different from theses adventures books.

All of this has prompted me to formulate a set of rule for writing a pulp adventure, should I do this crazy thing.

1) Short. Perhaps it was a function of the costs of paper, or the hellish deadlines these writers worked under, but the classic pulp novel were usually around 50,000 words long and often shorter. (For comparison my military sf novels are around 90 to 100 thousand words.)

2) Third Person Objective. These novels did not get into people’s heads very much. They were plot driven with events sparking the next event in the sequence until the adventure was over.

3) Black and White. Adventures about the struggled between Good and Evil were the bread and butter of the pulps. These were not written with nuance and the villains were not the heroes of their own story.

4) No Crisis of Conscience. The Heroes of pulp adventures, fitting in with the Black and White plots, did not doubt that they were right, and they did not have temptation to do the evil thing or take an immoral short cut.

5) No Evolution of Character. The Heroes, already in their perfected form, did not grow and change due to the course of their adventuring. They ended the story exactly the same person as they went into it.

6) No Quiet Introspective Moments. These are adventures, fights between Good and Evil, not explorations into the protean nature of the human soul. Pulp book did not waste time having characters just thinking and doubting themselves for pages and pages.

7) Do the Right Thing. Heroes not anti-heroes are the name of the game and that means that the lead characters always are moral, both in spirit and in deed. They always do the right thing.

Looking over these rules, I can see writing one of these would be quite a challenge.

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