If I told you I knew how to write dialog I would be lying. I have no clue how I do it. I listen and type what I hear. (Yes, these are the voices in my head.) So when people go on and on about dialog it bores me. And not just because I feel like it’s easy for me. It’s because I don’t think dialog is all that important. Not fundamentally. (more…)
Edwin settles the accounts and slips away.
There are many ways to dissect a story. One of the ways that has proven to be most rewarding for me is to consider only the reader’s expectations. Plot, story, theme, character, point of view — all of it, right out the window (it’s fairly liberating). The only analysis becomes what is expected vs. what actually happens.
Because if writing is a game, the reader’s expectation is the ball. If I can put some spin on that ball and move it around well, I feel like I’m doing my job as a storyteller. If I can’t I’m probably just wasting a reader’s valuable time.
Say I describe a character who’s an ex-drill instructor. Crew cut. Ramrod straight posture. The kind of guy who irons his t-shirts. You develop expectations about this guy. He probably doesn’t suffer fools gladly. You expect him to swear a bit and not back down from a fight.
And if tell a story where he swears and gets into fights, well, it’s probably going to be pretty dull. I could be colorful about how I describe the fights and invent all manner of interesting oaths, but that’s really fighting an uphill battle. All that stuff is the window dressing on the story itself. And if there’s no story beneath it, it basically has to be the best window dressing of all time. (Who wants to perfect window dressing when you should be building houses?)
But let’s say I tell you that this guy is scared. In fact, it’s been so long since he’s been afraid, he’s having trouble placing the sensation. It not what we expect from this character. Now it gets interesting. Why is he afraid? What is scaring him?
It could be a fierce monster. Or a guy pointing a gun at his head? But that’s what we expect. What if it’s a 9 year old girl? Now we’re curious about the girl. Why is he scared of the girl? She could have the power to start fires with her mind. But that feels kind of expected. What if she’s just an ordinary girl? No powers what so ever? What about an ordinary girl could scare a hard-ass Jarhead. And I mean really scare him.
Let’s make her Ebola Mary — a carrier of a fantastically lethal disease.
And what does this leatherneck do when confronted with a horrible, inglorious death. He could run away. He could talk big. He could break down crying. He could attack. He could whistle a happy tune. The entire universe of human action is open to us really. But which one is the least expected and why?
Because if everything happens as we expect it will, a story becomes dull as paste.
To be sure, this is quite a simplification of story construction. Some conventions must be adhered to. And paying certain things off creates a very enjoyable experience. But being aware of the expectations that story creates really helped me understand writing in a new way. In the next post I’ll test my analytical tool on a few well-known tales.
technorati tags:patrick e. mclean, Story, writing, The Structure of Story, Plots, Story Construction
Let’s analyze a few storires using the expectations model. Nothing rigorous here, just what popped off the top o my head.
The Book of Job: A man’s life falls apart. We expect him to curse his maker. We would totally sympathize if he did. (Since it’s his maker’s fault.) But he does not.
Gospel according to Mark: A man dies. We expect him to stay dead. He does not. He returns from the dead.
High Noon - Bad guy returns to town on the day of the former Sheriff’s wedding. We expect the Sherriff to get married and leave town. But he doesn’t. We expect at least some of the townspeople to help him - but they don’t. We expect his wife to stand by him, but she doesn’t. (Do not forsake me oh my Darling…)
Rocky - Even though the conventions of the boxing story demand that the underdog win at the end, the story creates expecations that Rocky is a bum. That he doesn’t stand a chance. Further, we expect the guy who’s a boxer to be brutish and rough. But the plot with Adrian defies that expectation by showing him to be surprisingly tender and gentle.
To Kill a Mockingbird - We expect Boo Radley to be a monster. He winds up saving Scout.
Don Quixhote - We expect the good Don to take the first good beating and go home. We expect Sancho Panza to wise up and desert the old fool.
Raiders of the Lost Ark - We expect Indy to get into a huge brawl with the guy with the sword - but he just shoots him.
I’m not saying unexpectedness is the gauge of a good story - but there appears to be something going on here. You give me a good story and I’ll show you that a big part of it is unexpected.
technorati tags:Patrick E. McLean, Structure of Story, Story, Writing, Story Construction, Plots
I have an friend who is a very talented actor. And one day he explained to me the secret of improv. No matter what happens, you have to respond with “Yes, but.” For example.
“Your hat is on fire.”
“Yes, but I bought it on sale.”
If you just agree with the other person, the tension is dissipated. If you say no, you really have to know where the story goes next. You have to take the ball and run with it for a while, and you reduce the possibility of the other person bailing you out. But “Yes, but…”? “Yes, but…” is magic.
“You’re wife has run off with another man.”
“(Yes, but…) I’ve been trying to be rid of that battleaxe for years.”
The very same thing is what I think of as the cardinal rule of drama. A character can never get what they want. Or if they do, it must turn out to be something very different than what they expected. (be careful what you wish for. Because If they get what they want the story or scene is over.
For example:
Guy walks into a bar and orders a drink. Bartender refuses to serve him because he’s a Sneech with only one star on his belly, and everybody knows this is “Two star on thar’s” town. But our Sneech is thirsty. So he demands a drink. Patrons of the bar try to throw him out. The Sneech beats them down. Sheriff comes in and breaks it up. The Sneech appeals to the Sherriff for justice. The Sheriff tells the Sneech to get out of town. As the Sneech walks out, he defiantly grabs a shot off the bar and downs it.
Replace the Sneech with Danny Glover and you’ve got a wonderful scene from Silverado.
For my writing, I try and extend this rule. Not only can the character never get what they want, but whatever the reader/audience expects to happen can’t happen. Maybe it’s that I’m a masocist and I just like playing tennis with two nets. But that’s another post.
technorati tags:writing, Patrick E. McLean, story, story construction, drama
Just posted on succeedinevil.com. You can find it here.
(It’s a doozy.)
The business of building stories seems not much different from the business of building anything else.
This is the insight of Lester Dent, the pulp writer who created Doc Savage. This was a guy who would regularly churn out 90,000 to 100,000 words a month on a manual typewriter. There’s no two ways about it, he was a monster. (Carpal Tunnel? Try micro-fractures in your fingertips.)
So, naturally, I’m interested in anything he has to say about story construction. And it makes intuitive sense to me. I have an above average opinion of my prose style. Me makes pretty wordses. But for a long time, when I tried to write a story, it would suck. Literally, the thing would fall down when you were reading it.
My stories had no foundations, the walls weren’t square and the roofs leaked.
But when I started paying attention to the structure and the rules of story. Magic started happening. And I went through a fundamental change. Instead of just enjoying the experience of a story, I started to also enjoy how they were made.
For a while I outlined obsessively. (I still do, only less obsessively.) I felt like there was a dearth of information about story and story construction. And that most of what was out there was written by people who weren’t writers. Who weren’t involved in the often messy business of writing stories. In short, dilettantes.
I’ve come to realize that it’s just the opposite. There is a wealth of story information out there. It’s just locked up in all the stories and films we love so much. It’s just that the first time I read or watched them I was too busy enjoying them (not a bad thing) to learn how they were put together. Because a story, if properly constructed, becomes invisible. You don’t say - “What an elegant subplot.” You say, “Aw man, look what happened to Billy.”
So instead of keeping all these notes and thoughts in my head. I’m going to blog them.
technorati tags:story construction, writing, Patrick E. McLean, plot
If you’ve heard more than one or two episodes of the Seanachai, you’ve got an inkling that I’m up to something more than just reading my own stories. For the most part, I’m composing specifically for the medium. And along the way, I’ve been experimenting and refining my ideas about how audio storytelling works. And I think it’s time to share.
Ideally, I’d like to put together an e-book on the subject. But rather than just think about doing it, I thought I would be better to do the first draft as a series of posts. And the working title for this amalgamation of ambitious little essays is The Rhetoric of Audio.
If Rhetoric is the art of effective persuasive speaking or writing then the Rhetoric of Audio would be the art of the effective use of sound. And I don’t know that anyone has written a book on the subject. With the explosion of podcasting, it’s a subject that seems important to me (and of interest to people I know)
My primary interest is how sound is used to convey effect and carry a story. In this sense the term rhetoric is used to indicate the persuasion of an audience that story which it patently fictional is in some sense true or real. Hopefully more true and real than everyday experience. And if we don’t feel this way about stories on some level, are they really worth anything?
Why does Sound have meaning?
The Uses of Sound
Sound as symbol
Sound as action
Sound as setting
Sound as character
Sound as emotion
Sound as closure
Sound as unknown
Storytelling vs. Story Reading
A broader definintion of reading
Voice technique
Towards a manual of style
A fine question (even if the tone was a little rude) and I’m glad you asked.
I’ve been travelling, working on a pitch for a thing with a guy at a company (I don’t want to jinx it, but it’s more of a Thing with a Guy at a Company.) and trying to make a little money to feed myself and the poor, suffering, hungry people at the IRS.
I have been working on the next episode(s). I even have a plan for the next 8 or so podcasts - but I just haven’t been able to get to them. Kind of like a dream where you’re trying to run away from a tiger, but it’s like you’re running underwater. And the harder you try, the slower you move. And that tiger wants to eat you so bad, he’s breaking all the laws of physics just to get to you.
What if the Seanachai was less audio and more text? By making a podcast, I’m adding four hours, minimum to the production process. And I’m adding to the time it takes you to assimilate the story. (Ah, got to use the BorgWord there.)
So how many of you check the ‘blog or read this thing in a newsreader? And how many people would rather have an interesting post or story every couple of days, and audio once a month?
Read or Listen?
It’s the mournful refrain of the Econ tribe, “Tradeoffs. Tradeoffs. Tradeoffs.”
Maybe current events are nothing more than ancient events with better TV coverage?
