Saturday, February 17, 2007

SECRETS OF WRITING: FORESHADOWING

There’s a method for creating a feeling of anticipation in the audience by playing with their subconscious. It’s called foreshadowing. Foreshadowing involves cueing the audience early on that something is going to happen. But you do it in a subtle manner, so they don’t take notice of it on a conscious level.

There are several approaches to this technique. One is visual, the other is textual. When employing foreshadowing you don’t want the audience to see what you’re doing. You want them to feel it.

Shakespeare employed the textual method with dialog in JULIUS CAESAR. In the beginning of the play the characters keep using terms that involve cutting, stabbing, knives, etc. This foreshadows the scene where Caesar gets assassinated. Other dialog also indicates harm to Caesar in an indirect way.  For example, Caesar is walking through a crowd with Cassius, Casca and Brutus:

SOOTHSAYER: Beware the ides of March.
CAESAR: What man is that?
BRUTUS: A soothsayer bids you to beware the ides of March.

Later, Brutus talks to Casca about Caesar’s epileptic fit in the throng.

CASCA: ...before he fell down, when he perceived the common herd was glad he refused the crown, he plucked me ope his doublet and offered them his throat to cut. ...Three or four wenches , where I stood, cried ‘Alas, good soul!’ and forgave him with all their hearts: but there’s not heed to be taken of them; if Caesar had stabbed their mothers, they would have done no less.

Later still Casca talks to Cassius about Caesar:

CASCA: Indeed, they say the senators tomorrow mean to establish Caesar as a king; and he shall wear his crown by sea and land, in every place, save here in Italy.

CASSIUS: I know where I will wear this dagger then.

And so on…

The dialog serves to cue the audience that Caesar is doomed, because he is blessed with power that other’s don’t want him to have.

The visual foreshadowing technique can be accomplished one of two ways. Both are symbolic, but one form is more abstract. Therefore I call this first method abstract foreshadowing.

In abstract foreshadowing, you cue the reader with a symbol you prepare for them. This symbol is used when certain things happen. Every time, for example, something bad happens you show the symbol somewhere. Then, when you use the symbol later on, the audience subconsciously understands that something bad is going to happen soon. The symbol can be anything you choose. A woman wearing a big hat, a Christian fish icon, a laughing baby, a dog rooting through garbage, a smiley face button.

This technique must be done in a carefully balanced way so the audience recognizes the symbol, but isn’t hit over the head with it. You want them to be cued, not to be slammed. Otherwise, the technique becomes a parody. Like the fruit cart that always gets smashed in movie car chase scenes. 

The second method involves giving the audiences incomplete glimpses of the future. I call this the Oracle method. If the story takes place in the past, you can use a framing sequence to suggest something happens in the story that leads to a certain conclusion. For example, your story’s narrator can have one arm, but in the main body of the story, he has two arms.

You can also have a character get incomplete glimpses of the future in dreams, visions, or it can be foreshadowed through the knowledge other characters have of things that will affect the hero that he is still ignorant of.

Both the “abstract” and “oracle” methods can also be used in text. Symbolic phraseology can be used to preceed events as we saw in Julius Caesar. Oracle methods can also be used in dialog. For examples of both methods, study the script for Espers #1 provided in a later chapter.

REMEMBER: Foreshadowing creates anticipation subconsciously. It shouldn’t be obvious.

Friday, February 16, 2007

Secrets of Writing: Themes

In addition to the Premise, your story will be much better off when you add themes. A premise is an argument the story is making. Theme are subjects the story deals with. These subjects can be related to the premise or not. But they are never dealt with in an obvious way. They are interwoven into the fabric of the story the way the premise is.

When something happens to us, we don’t vocalize what the theme or premise of that event was, because we’re never seeing it that way. Neither should our fictional characters. The events in a story are carefully constructed by a writer to create the themes and the premise, but they should be a natural component of everything that happens. They can’t be so obvious that the characters themselves would be aware of them.

But the characters can discuss the issues that affect their lives in the story we present, as if they are subconsciously understanding their role in the story.

Examples of themes are: The meaning of brotherhood, the value of love, the price of honor, etc.

Themes give the story more resonance. They can make a generally simple story seem to have more depth and value.

When employing themes you want to create scenes that explore the theme the same way a story explores a premise. The theme becomes the premise of the scene.

You can also use themes as a form of color for the story. For example, you can explore food and cooking, or fashion, or music. This use of themes gives the story more of a light hearted feel, and provides a nice sort of resonance.

Anyway you choose to use themes can help add some depth and literary wit to your story. They’re a nice technique to play with.

REMEMBER: Themes enhance the story and provide depth and resonance. 

Thursday, February 15, 2007

Secrets of Writing: Irony

Most people see irony as the nature of the universe. Positive and negative forces cancel each other out, like matter and anti-matter. In fiction, irony is somehow amusing to us because it shows that both sides can lose a war.

Irony is also used to show improbable coincidence can happen, or that expression an intent are two different things.

In the film THE LAST EMPEROR, it was shown that the Emperor of China was revered as a god, lived in an incredible palace surrounded by an army of servants, but had no power and was a virtual prisoner. This is irony. That someone so powerful could be so powerless.

The film MOULIN ROUGE tells the story of the great artist Henri Toulouse-Lautrec. All through the film, he searches for someone who will love him for who is and not what he looks like, but when he finds her, he dumps her. This is irony.

The Audience believes in Newtonian laws. They like to see causality. If someone has power, we should see the pros and the cons of that power. If someone has money, we should see why that’s a problem. Irony adds a sense of verisimilitude and depth. Irony also makes for good endings to stories, because it’s more believable to Audiences than the perfect happy ending. There’s humor in Irony that can also be exploited.

The film SULLIVAN’S TRAVELS is a great study in how irony can be used to comedic effect. Joel McCrea plays John L. Sullivan, a director who wants to make a meaningful films about human suffering. So he dresses up like a hobo and goes out on the road to learn how real people live. All his life, Sullivan’s had nothing but good luck, so he doesn’t know what suffering is like.  But no matter where he goes good fortune smiles upon him. People take him in and give him food and clothes, beautiful women buy him meals. And even worse, when he tries to hitch a ride on a truck, it takes him back to Hollywood! Finally he decides to use his money to help the poor, so he starts handing out money to all the homeless he meets and is robbed. It gets worse from there, but I don’t want to spoil this great film. One of the ironies of the film is when he looks for trouble he can’t find it. When he isn’t looking for it, he finds it in spades.

The first super-hero story ever written was all about irony. Philip Wylie’s THE GLADIATOR was about a man with superpowers who fought for our side during World War I. He was a great hero during the war, but afterward he realized there was no place for a person like him in society. People were afraid of him. After all, someone with the powers of extreme brute force are only useful for destructive purposes. They have no place in a peaceful world. So the irony was, all that power made him a hero in war and a pariah in peacetime.

REMEMBER: Irony adds a sense of realism and can make serious events funny.

Wednesday, February 14, 2007

Secrets of Writing: Pacing

The ability to pace a story is one of the most important talents you can possess. There’s nothing worse than a story that bogs down with boring scenes or is so frantic it’s over in a flash and you feel empty. Pacing is the technique that controls the flow of the story. This is done with the fine tuning of Rhythm and Tempo. The other component of pacing is Narrative Drive.

You want the pacing of the story to reflect the mood you’re trying to set. If the story is about romance, you don’t want the frantic pace of an action story. If you’re doing an action story, you don’t want the slow pace of a psychological drama. 

Pace helps define mood. Mood creates feeling. The pace of the story will have an impact on how the Audience feels when experiencing it. You want the mood to be exactly what you want it to be, so pay close attention to the following systems:

Rhythm and Tempo

Rhythm is the length of the scenes in a sequence. The length of the scenes effect the ebb and flow of the story, in addition to the polarity of those scenes. If you make the scene lengths short, you speed up the Rhythm. If you stretch them out, you can slow the rhythm down. As a rule of thumb, the act climax scenes are the longest in a story. They are where the most critical moments take place. Building toward the act climax, the scenes are usually short for reasons of tempo.

Tempo is the level of activity in a scene. If the scene involves wild action, that’s a different tempo than a scene with two people sitting on a couch talking about existentialism. You want the tempo exciting when building toward an act climax. The Kinetic Principle is a rule that says the shorter the scenes, the more intense the tempo. In my first comic series, ESPERS, I employed this technique in the fourth issue. The scenes building toward the story climax were short. Sometimes one panel in length. And I added a ticking clock. This gave an intense urgency to the whole build up to the climax.

It wasn’t something I’d read about back then, it was something I came up with on my own. And now you know the reason it works.

Narrative Drive

Narrative drive is the power of the story. If the story has a lot of power and momentum, it will drive the scenes and the pace will be amplified. Even if the pace is actually slow, a strong narrative drive adds more emotional energy.

You control the narrative drive with story values and scene polarity. By carefully choosing the importance of the events in a scene, you can increase or decrease the narrative drive.

Monday, February 12, 2007

Secrets of Writing: Flashbacks

This is one of the most abused, misunderstood, and over used techniques in fiction. But, handled properly, it can achieve powerful results.

Flashbacks are a look back in time, revealing the backstory. They should never be used at the beginning of a story and they should never dominate a story. This is because flashbacks stop the story midstream, announce that we are now going somewhere else, and jump back in time. So they must be important enough to do that. If you need to show some element of the backstory in a visual way, this is a method, but understand a few things about flashbacks first.

They are essentially a form of exposition. They exist for the express purpose of passing on information to the audience. So they need to be dynamic and entertaining on their own.
They should play as one act stories with a trigger event. The climax of the flashback should have a powerful dramatic punch. This will add to the energy of the main story. 

They should be kept to a minimum, because this technique announces itself as a technique more strongly than any other. The Audience receives a jolt to their suspension of disbelief. In real life we can’t play back time. Audiences are used to flashbacks, but they are a distraction if done without a good reason. And many find them annoying, because they interrupt the story flow.

One way to make flashbacks more natural is to treat them as a character’s memory. Or a narration of an event the character witnessed. We show the Audience what the character saw in a visual way, but it’s limited by their POV.

Framing

This variant of the flashback makes the whole story a flashback, with only the opening and ending of the story in present time. The name of the technique comes from the opening and closing of the story, known as the “frame”. To maintain linkage with the present, writers often insert a panel or a page in the midst of the story to remind the Audience that they’re witnessing events in the past. I used this device in my graphic novel SINKING.

This method is used mainly to show how the past impacts on the present. The end of the story reveals how the events of the past (the main body of the story) led to the state of affairs in the present. It’s a good idea to make the end sequence surprising in some way. The film EDWARD SCISSORHANDS employed this technique. For a more complex example, I recommend the director’s cut of ONCE UPON A TIME IN AMERICA.

REMEMBER: Flashbacks should only be used for important reasons.

Sunday, February 11, 2007

Secrets of Writing: Scene Transitions

(This mainly concerns comics and visual storytelling, such as film)

When a scene ends, you need to move on to the next one in a smooth fashion so the Audience isn’t jarred out of the spell you’ve hopefully laid on them. Scene Transitions are the technique for doing this.

There are three basic ways to make a scene transition. One is visual, one is textual, the other is random (also known as the “Jump cut” ). Visual transitions involve linking images through thematic or symbolic parallels. Textual transitions bridge the two scenes with copy. Random transitions just throw you into another situation with no apparent linkage.

Let’s look at some examples:

Visual

Imagine four comic panels: A man drinking tea is shot, the next panel shows his tea cup shattered on the floor with the tea creating a puddle. Below are the next two panels, the first shows the man’s dead body, lying in a puddle of blood. The next shot shows a forensics technician drawing a chalk outline while another is dusting for prints in the background. Dialog: “Looks like he was killed about three hours ago.”

In the above sequence we’ve witnessed a man get murdered. This is followed by a new scene sometime later when the body is found. The forensics man’s dialog tells us the estimated time jump. The thematic linking device is spilled fluid. We see the shattered cup symbolizing destruction, the spilled tea symbolizing blood. We cut to a shot of real blood and a dead man, then pull back to establish the context and the jump in time. Here’s another example of a visual transition.

IMAGINE: Two panel scene showing a man and a woman in a country field kissing. There is a tree behind them. Next panel shows a close up of the tree with a heart and initials carved in the bark. Next is a three panel sequence showing first a heart shape, then pulling back to show a different man than we saw before pasting up a billboard which is covering the old one. The old one was a heart. It was an add for a dating service. The new billboard is an add for Pagers. The man putting up the billboard is thinking: “Why wasn’t Mary home when I called her?”

Here we again use symbolism, in this case the icon of a heart to make the jump. But we can also do it with poses. In my graphic novel LEX LUTHOR: THE UNAUTHORIZED BIOGRAPHY, I employed transitions involving people in similar poses when we jumped from one scene to the next to make the visual jump in a manner that was smooth. It can seem a little flashy, so you have to be careful using this technique. The effect should be subliminal. In the case of the Lex Luthor book, I often used it as a metaphor. In one scene we see the photo of a murdered man. The first shot of the next scene showed him in the same position, only lying in bed, waking up from a nasty drunk. You can play with visual transitions in many different ways

The trouble with visual transitions is you have to get your artist to agree to do them. Not that they’re such a big thing to ask for, but you’d be surprised how some artists feel about the writer making visual demands. And sometimes the artist will just plain forget to do them. More on that later.

Textual

IMAGINE: Two panel scene showing a super hero flying over a city, looking for something. Captions read: “I spend three hours on patrol over the city. No sign of the Fish. But something tells me, he’s down there...” Below this a two panel scene. A man in a three piece suit with a Fishhead, instead of a human head, is having a meeting with his henchman in a shabby looking loft. Caption in the first panel: “...somewhere.” Dialog: “All right, youse guys. Let’s talk about our next job.”

In the above example we see the broken caption that begins in the last panel and ends in the first panel of the next scene. This technique has been used heavily since it was popularized by Alan Moore in the mid-eighties.

IMAGINE: Three panel scene showing two men arguing. Man 1, Panel 1: I’m telling you, she stole the rock! Man 2, panel 2: You’re out of your mind! Sheila would never do something like that! Man 1, Panel 3: “Well, get ready for a shock, buddy. ‘Cause she’s been caught on video.” Below this a two panel sequence. A woman has a small black box in her hand. A jewelry box. She’s standing in an expensive looking office before a desk. We can’t see the man on the other side because he’s off panel. She holds out the box to him, smiling. Dialog: “I’ve brought you the rock, Dino.” The next panel shows the man on the other side of the desk, taking the box from her hand, smiling: Dialog: “Nice work, baby.”

The above example linked the two scenes with dialog that was about the same subject. It was a logical flow of the story from a scene discussing the theft, to a shot of the thief passing on the loot to her employer. This transition used subject as a linking device. You can also use symbolic transfers by using symbolic dialog in place of visual symbolism as in this example:

IMAGINE: Two panel scene. A man is standing over the body of a cat that has been killed. The man’s really upset. Panel 1 dialog: “Kilroy!” Panel 2: “They killed you....didn’t they. I know it was them.” Below that a two panel sequence showing a woman sitting on a couch with an empty bottle of tequila sitting on the coffee table before her and a shot glass in her hand. She looks drunk and depressed. Panel 1: “My career’s dead. It’s over...” Panel two, she bends forward and cries, putting her face in her hands.

Random

Random transitions involve jumps to new scenes without any apparent linking device. However, this is misleading. The linking device is the logical progression of events. As we see in the following example, there is a reason we made the jump. It makes perfect sense.

Insert Art: Three panels of two people fighting in a desert. In the Background are the smoking ruins of an airplane.  Below that a two panel scene showing a group of military men in a command tent, looking at maps. Dialog: “They’ve got to be somewhere in sector seven. Send out some recon patrols.”

The transition made no sense visually, nor were there any linking words. But there was a sense of sequential storytelling at work. We made the assumption that the man in the tent was talking about the two people fighting in the first scene. The sequence seems logical and our mind puts together the story. Two men crashed in the desert and end up fighting over something. Meanwhile, a rescue party is out looking for them.

Random jumps must involve some kind of logical progression in the story. The progression need not be apparent in the first panel of the following scene, but it should be apparent in the following panel. If you confuse the Audience too much, they will be forced to go back and reread the previous page again and that will interrupt the story flow.

REMEMBER: Transitions must be clear. They keep the story moving smoothly.

Saturday, February 10, 2007

Secrets of Writing: Misdirection

The Audience resents cheap surprises. They don’t like it when you throw arbitrary things at them. But they do like it when you surprise them with in an intelligent way. One technique for doing this is called Misdirection. You make them think one thing is going to happen, then you surprise them with something else instead.

This has to be done correctly, though. Too many bad movies have used this technique in a shoddy way. Everyone has seen the frightened woman who feels she’s being stalked by a murderer. She stupidly walks into a dark room and doesn’t see the shadowy figure hiding in plain sight, which springs out at her....and turns out to be her goofy boyfriend. The audience relaxes their guard for a second and then the real murderer leaps at them from another dark part of the room and kills them both!

Misdirection doesn’t need to involve psycho killers. It can be used for everything. It’s a form of a reversal, but it’s a double whammy because it’s not just a reversal for a character in the story, it’s a reversal of the Audience’s expectations.

You set something up so the Audience expects “A” to happen. But then, when “A” is supposed to happen you hit them with “B” instead. But “B” has to be set up first. It can’t just come out of nowhere. I has to be a believable event.

Therefore, you set up “A” so it looks like “A” is inevitable. Like it’s a sure thing. And subtly, you set up “B” in a completely innocuous way. Sometimes setting up “B” can be avoided if it’s something that’s inherently natural to the situation. To use the bad example set above. If the Audience is expecting the psycho killer to be lurking behind the door and it’s just the goofy boyfriend, that’s a natural (though annoying) event. The goofy boyfriend has to be introduced to the story first, of course.

Let’s say the story involves a car race across country and the villain has sprayed an oil slick ahead of the hero that he’s unaware of. It’s around a corner, so by the time you see it, its too late to stop. Earlier, another car hit the slick and crashed. It exploded and sent metal shards all over the road. The audience will expect something similar to happen to the hero’s car. But instead, the hero’s car runs over the metal shards and gets two flats. Because the tires are flat, the car is able to keep some sort of traction and is able to pass the slick safely.

The key is to bury the set up for action “B” in a way that doesn’t seem obvious. When the car explodes, the audience should think it’s just part of the action of the story, but as we discussed, there should be repercussions for each action.

REMEMBER: Misdirection must be set up as a double whammy, not as a cheap surprise.

Friday, February 09, 2007

Secrets of Writing: Feeding Plot

The Audience will need to know a lot of information in the course of your story. The more complex the story, the more information they’ll need. But you can’t just shove this information down their throats. It goes back to the old dating rule I mentioned before. Your goal is to seduce, not to bore.  If you want to seduce them you have to feed them plot details like sugared grapes, one by one.

To do this, you don’t tell them everything they need to know about a character and his back story right away. You only tell them what they need to know so they can form a picture in their mind that’s more solid than the one the artist provides. You then slowly feed them more and more info at every opportunity. But in ways that disguise the actual value of this information.

Too often writers will have characters using this kind of obvious exposition:

“So, Ajax, do you remember how we defeated Blue Snot yesterday?”

“Yes, Nukehead, by using your polaris beams on him while I blew up his computer. And then we went to lunch at McDonalds. You had the Happy Meal and I had a Quarter Pounder and fries.”

“I’m glad you remember these details, Ajax, because it seems his computer wasn’t completely damaged. And now Professor XYZ has come back to claim it. I think this will cause some serious problems for us.”

“Not Professor XYZ! I thought he was killed when we...”

You get the picture. The characters are telling each other what they already know in a forced, unrealistic manner. This is known as “table dusting”. It’s supposed to give the Audience vital information, but it’s really an amateurish way to do things. In a later chapter we’ll talk about Ex positional Dialog, but for now let’s address the concept of feeding plot.

If your Audience needs to know something, it’s better to tell them in a visual way if you can. If you can’t, then the person who passes on this information should tell it to a character who doesn’t know it, and who wants or needs to know it for some reason. This way, you at least make the passing of information credible.

You also want to make it succinct. Say what you have to say in the briefest, yet believable way you can. The less they have to read, the easier it’ll be to remember. And save the best information for last. Especially if it involves personal secrets. You can get more mileage that way.

REMEMBER: Feed them plot information in small doses. Save the best for last.

Thursday, February 08, 2007

Secrets of Writing: Chance and Coincidence

This is very dangerous territory, however it can be useful. Things that happen by chance or coincidence can be used to provide meaning to a story. But they can also make your story look ridiculous if used improperly.

Coincidence is a popular device in comedy, because it’s somewhat preposterous. It happens in real life, but rarely. So if it happens a lot in a story, it’s absurd, and thus can be used for comic effect.

It’s perfectly acceptable to begin a story with a coincidence. People believe they can happen. And coincidence brings across the feeling that fate is involved. So using coincidence to start a story can add a certain symbolic charge. But in serious fiction, it should never be used to end a story. Coincidence not only robs the hero of his shining moment, it never happens when you need it to happen. The audience won’t buy a coincidental ending.

It generally should never be used throughout a story. Unless you want to establish the premise that life is absurd. By using chance or coincidence as a causality for major events, you pain the picture that life is nuts. But this should be done carefully and it’s better handled in comedic stories. 

In most cases chance and coincidence are used as cheap plot devices by writers who are stuck with what to do next. I’ll do a mea culpa here and admit to having committed this sin myself. But it’s something to be avoided. Audiences have become very sophisticated over the years having been exposed to so many books, comics, TV shows and films. They are very familiar with good and bad writing. They can spot a weak plot a mile away.

Chance and coincidence may happen in real life, but in fiction, people find it hard to swallow unless you use it in certain ways. The Greek philosopher Heraclitus stated that “Character is Destiny”. We all have a feeling in our lives, especially in our youth, that we have some sort of destiny before us, good or bad. Chance represents the hand of fate to many people. This is why Shakespeare was able to get away with using it so much in his play OTHELLO. The play makes us feel Othello had a destiny to fulfill and fate was going to make sure it happened.

When chance and coincidence is used in favor of the hero, the audience doesn’t usually believe it. But when it’s used against the hero, it seems more realistic. In our gambling story, for example, if Kyle won the money in the story the way we supposed in the up ending, it would be unacceptable to a lot of people, because that’s just too unbelievable. But the ending where he loses, or the ironic ending where he loses his gains is far more “realistic”.

REMEMBER: Never end a story with a coincidence and keep chance to a minimum.

Wednesday, February 07, 2007

Secrets of Writing: Text and Subtext

In a nutshell, Text is what you see, Subtext is the hidden meaning behind it. Or, if you prefer a more intellectual explanation, text is the tactile, surface experience of the story. Subtext is the inner life of the story. The subconscious. 

If you want to be a good writer, you need to get a handle on subtext. Because no good writer writes “on the nose.” Writing on the nose means what the character says is exactly what the character means. Everything is textual.

In real life, people do not say exactly what they mean most of the time. In fact, some people are incapable of it. Bad fiction is full of dialog where the characters say precisely what’s on their mind and precisely what they really think.

But subtext isn’t limited to dialog. It can be part of a situation. Situations can have hidden meaning. So can objects in a room. So can the choice of clothes someone wears. If a woman dresses sexy the subtext could be she’s looking to get attention, and/or laid. If a man dresses in a suit, it means he’s about business of some kind.

An example of situational subtext can be found in the movie DISCLOSURE, when Demi Moore’s character invites Michael Douglas up to her office after hours. It’s a business meeting where she tries to seduce him. But even more is going on there than meets the eye. She’s also trying to set him up.

In BATMAN RETURNS, Bruce Wayne shows Dick Grayson his motorcycle collection. The subtext of this scene is he’s trying to seduce Grayson into staying at the mansion. The dialog in this scene is full of subtext. 

We’ll deal with subtextual dialog in depth later, but just remember for now that you can create more meaning in a story by using subtext. And with dialog, it makes it more realistic if you dance around the direct meaning of the words.

Audiences need to be drawn in to a story on a participation level. Subtext gives them the means to do that. They start to fill in the blanks with their mind and this makes them more engaged. You need the means to do this because comics limits you with its visuals. In prose, the reader’s mind creates images based on the words of the writer. It’s a very personal thing for each reader. In comics, they see what the artist has represented as the actual appearance of things. This limits their imagination. They don’t have to become too engaged in the work. So in order to make them more engaged, we need psychological tricks to draw them in more. Subtext is one of those methods.

Text, that which is obvious, serves as the surface reality beyond which our minds need to penetrate. Subtext is the prize we get for making the effort.

REMEMBER: Subtext creates meaning for the Audience.