Fail

Of course, I failed Script Frenzy.

It's my fault. I'm not going to blame the new job, or the marketing for CAGES, or all the other crap I'm doing, or the fact that writing a screenplay is goddammit seriously hard. It's my fault.

Still, I really like what I've written. Enough that I'll keep going and finish the damn thing, some time, at some point in the indeterminate future. This I swear.

By the way, I'm writing the script using Zhura.com, and I really like it. Don't let the silly social networking look of it put you off -- the in-browser script editor is robust and powerful. If you'd rather not download a copy of Final Draft for whatever reason, this is your best alternative.

The reviews are in for CAGES, and people like it. They really like it. This makes me happy. I'm also soon to be doing a phone interview thing for CAGES, which is bound to be embarassing.

So I guess Cubans can buy computers now. And they run fucking Windows XP. Look, I don't want to sound crazy here, but if the Cuban government wants to shield its people from the grasping talons of corporate capitalism or whatever, well, why not go open source?

I can't believe I never heard of this before: Lego's free Factory program that lets you build your perfect virtual Lego model, then delivers all the required bricks to your door. How cool is that?

Also, I own the film Iron Man an apology. Here goes: Iron Man, I'm sorry I pre-judged you and said bad things about your trailer after San Diego last year. You are actually really awesome. Let's be friends.

Finally, I leave you with this parting image, which I'm pretty sure I saw on a gilded mural within the hallowed Duomo of Florence.

Frenzy!

So what do you do if you're knee-deep in a half-written novel and about to start a new job that'll most likely consume your writing time?

Well, if you're me, you start writing a feature film for Script Frenzy.

What's Script Frenzy? Why, it's a NaNoWriMo spin-off project wherein participants write a 100 page script in the month of April, that's what. And I'm really, super-duper happy with my idea, and with the 16 pages I've written so far.

And yet, pride cometh before the fall. Let this post stand as a digital signpost of my writing hubris, precursor to the inevitable Halfway Through The Script Crisis. I give it, oh, a week and a half.

Video Mixtape: Under The Gun

If you read Josh Hechinger's blog (and you should, if only to marvel at the crazy amount of work the guy churns out), you'll have noted that he and I are co-writing a hitman romantic comedy comic called Under the Gun.

He recently posted a very cool Youtube mixtape of his influences for the series. I thought I'd respond in kind.

(Although mine's not quite as cool, because he already took that damn perfect Killers song.)

An early scene from The Killer, starring Chow Yun Fat:



Scene from The Big Hit:



Rock You Like A Hurricane - The Scorpions:




Warning: If you are not actually Josh Hechinger, this post might make little or no sense to you. In which case I advise you to back away slowly. Or, hey, stick around if you want to. It's your call.

Organic Storytelling

I've always been a bit of a plotter.

Not to the point of distraction, but just enough to get by. Outlines, treatments, breakdowns; whatever helps me figure out the next scene in advance, so I'm not just typing in the dark.

Not so with the novel. Thanks to the mad momentum of NaNo, I long ago passed the point of plotted scenes. And it's kinda-sorta working.

You read about novelists whose characters 'speak to them', make their decisions, even surprise the writer. Until this month, I didn't really know what they were talking about.

Today, I discovered that a major character in my story is not at all who I thought they were. In fact, they're just about to do something horribly cruel and unusual to the main character -- an act of betrayal for which the main character, the (imagined) reader and myself will probably never forgive them -- and I had no idea. I've been writing about this character for seventy-five thousand words, and I only just found out.

How cool is that?

NaNoWriMo, And Travel Plans

It's the most wonderful time of the year.

I'm talking about November. It's that time when -- instead of doing something sane and/or productive -- we put aside our daily lives to try and write 50 thousand words of a novel in 30 days. 'We', in this case, meaning myself and 80 thousand other deluded souls around the globe.

I did this last year, and I failed -- I only got halfway to 50K. Looking back, the reason why seems obvious: I was doing very well and enjoying what I wrote. This obviously caused me to overthink, slow down, wonder if I was doing the right thing. If this was going so well, I said to myself, maybe I should stop writing it all on the fly? Perhaps I should take the time to properly plot it out; treat it with some dignity?

So I stopped and, of course, did bugger all else with it for most of the following year.

But this year is different. This year, I'm ready and I'm not going to lose. Because I'm going to cheat.

I'll do this by continuing my novel from last year, rather than writing a new one from scratch. I've been working on it most every day for a month now, so I have a flying start. And I already started last night, thus giving myself a day's buffer on the wordcount. All these things are kinda-sorta considered cheating if you're going by the official rules of the competition, but that's just the sort of cheating bastard I am. Like I said, this year I plan to win.

But here's the twist: I'm flying to Viet Nam in 3 days.

Long story short: My partner happened to have November free from work, and we decided we'd like to go somewhere for a month. We found some very cheap flights, plus we have friends to stay with over there, so it all fell into place. Unfortunately, it adds a bit of a challenge to my writing regimen -- how do you get into a writing groove while travelling around Asia? How do you concentrate on your story when a hundred new sights, sounds and tastes are vying for your attention?

Well, it won't be that bad. We lived in Viet Nam for 3 months last year, so I know Saigon like the back of my hand. I won't have to spend all my time worrying about what food to eat, which sights to see, how to say please and thankyou and all that crap. I already know all the best cafes and wireless spots. So as long as something else doesn't pop up to compete for my attention, I should be able to make it through November with 50k words.

Something like a contract to write a feature film script. Like the one I just received today.

Goddammit.

Oh, and if you're interested in watching me fail in real time, you can check out my wordcount here at my NaNo profile. And if anyone else who reads this is doing NaNo, let me know and I'll add you as a Writing Buddy. God knows we need all the support we can get.

Amazing Resource For Writers/TV Fans

I think I just found the coolest wiki on the net: The TV Tropes Wiki. It covers far more than just TV, and goes beyond a simple listing of cliches; instead it focuses on the way our most common narratives actually work. It's also freaking funny.

In a short browse, I learned the following useful facts:

• If your show has a Proud Warrior Race Guy (often a Scary Black Man), that character can later evolve into a Warrior Poet.
• Is your villain suffering from Villain Decay? Begin Spikeification immediately, but watch out for Flanderization!
• If you've got a bad case of Jean Grey Escalation, whatever you do, don't hang it on a lampshade.
• Genre Blindness is to be avoided. Contractual Genre Blindness, on the other hand, is kinda cool.
• And What Kind of Lame Power is Heart Anyway? (A question for the ages.)

Also, the entry for Five Man Band has some amazing and thought-provoking examples of shows and how their characters fit the archetype (Grey's Anatomy and Mythbusters?!).

Until next time, True Believers...

Writing Drama -- A Great Resource for Writers

This is a capsule review/recommendation of Le Clown & L'enfant's Writing Drama, written by Yves Lavandier. Full disclosure: They were kind enough to send me a free copy all the way from France, so I thought the least I could do was talk about their book.




First, let's talk about what it isn't.

It's not a Hollywood handbook, full of insider gossip and tips on how to survive pitch meetings. It's not a how-to guide for people with no idea how to format a script. It's not a small book (in fact, it's almost 600 pages of fairly small type). And it's not a book for everyone.

It is, however, incredibly worthwhile for the intermediate-to-experienced writer, or anyone interested in the craft of dramaturgy. It's an unashamedly thorough and serious book, containing hundreds upon hundreds of well-researched examples to back up the author's opinions -- which are of course prominently on display.

The first few chapters are full of bold assertions and opinions, as if Lavandier were getting it out of the way early to allow time for the naysayers to leave the room. He sets up very quickly that he believes in dramatic rules, has little time for fuzziness and divine inspiration, and dislikes the Auteur Theory (a common tune, but his takedown of it is actually very readable -- complete with swipes at Godard). He's big on the idea that conflict lies at the heart of life, and that drama is life.

He then goes on to the real nuts and bolts of drama: the protagonist and his relationship to the objective; the idea of obstacles -- what's effective and what's not, how melodrama works, whether tragedy is really dead; how to properly use deus ex machina and Macguffins.

Further chapters deal with Characterisation (where we learn why even minor characters require objectives, and Lavandier takes a humorous jab at the male Rescuer character, as embodied by DiCaprio in Titanic), Structure (mostly the usual stuff: inciting incident, Act 2 twist, death and rebirth of the protagonist), and Unity (where things all go a bit Aristotelian). We also get informative chapters on Dialogue, Character, and Exposition (and how to place it so it doesn't suck),

Then we get to the more unique chapters. There's one on Preparation, for instance, in which Lavandier discusses proper foreshadowing and how not to tilt your authorial hand, or cash all those (metaphorical) chips too early. There's a fantastically in-depth chapter on Dramatic Irony, which includes many, many examples and explanations, and just might be the highlight of the book. And there's a whole section on Comedy, which Lavandier argues for and champions as one of the most versatile and powerful forms of drama.

The book is rounded off with some toolbox-y tips on authorial intention, the work process, writing for children, writing short films, and the right ways to read a script.

If I'm making the book sound dry or overly academic, it's not. Lavandier has an easy, conversational-intellectual style, and he likes to deviate into interesting little alleyways: Why a car is not a character, for instance, or a full-blown defense of caricature as a form of comedy.

There's really only one big problem I could see: The book is mostly about film, but the author likes to toss in the occasional reference to plays or comics, just to spice it up. While he's obviously incredibly knowledgeable on the first two subjects, I often felt like comics were given the short end of the stick. He tends to talk only about bandes dessinees, and then only about old staples like Tintin and Asterix. This is sort of the equivalent of pointing out the flaws in Golden Age Superman comics -- quaint, but ultimately a bit pointless.

Other than that, it's an extremely useful and informative book for anyone who wants to learn the rules of drama... and for professionals who think they know everything under the sun. I've had it for a while now, but I feel like I've barely scratched the surface. It's certainly something I'll be going back to, and I plan to put it on my Shelf of Usefulness, next to Strunk & White, Scott McCloud, and John Gardner. Frankly, I'm not one for screenwriting books, but if I had to pick the most advanced, most comprehensive, and generally most helpful book on the subject, I'd pick Writing Drama.

If you want to know more, there's a good interview with the author at his site. And if you'd like to buy a copy, you can order it straight from the publisher (strangely, Amazon don't stock it).

ALL CAPS

People are always interested to learn that there's no standard script format in comics.

Okay, no, they're never really that interested. But I was interested, the first time I learned that fact. Coming from a screenwriting background, where readers/agents/anyone will happily shred your script because it has improperly indented sluglines, or the wrong brand of metal brads or whatever, it was a breath of fresh air.

The fun part (or annoying part, depending on your point of view) is that you get to change the way you write a comics script to suit every new project or new artist. CAGES, which I've been working on for over a year now, has gone through dozens of slightly different script formats. But it wasn't until the latest rewrite that I hit on the idea of writing out the dialogue in ALL CAPS.

Warren Ellis does it, and I'm sure others do too. It's a pretty obvious idea -- after all, that's the way all comics text appears on the page. But it always seemed clunky and distracting, somehow, until I actually gave it a shot. Also, instead of underlining text that was going to be bolded, I decided to try actually, you know, bolding it.

Here's how it looked before:

RAPH: Mike, come on…

MIKE: You come on, Raph!

RAPH: What does that even mean? Look, I’m just saying, at this point we should probably –

RAPH: Run!

Whereas, in the new draft, it looks like this:

RAPH: MIKE, COME ON…

MIKE: YOU COME ON, RAPH!

RAPH: WHAT DOES THAT EVEN MEAN? LOOK, I’M JUST SAYING, AT THIS POINT WE SHOULD PROBABLY –

RAPH: RUN!

I have no idea why, but I find this method about a thousand times easier to work with. It's such a little change, but it's allowing me to produce much more natural dialogue. Perhaps it's something to do with the bold making it easier to 'feel' the emphasis, but who knows?

Whatever works, right?

(This post was cross-posted to the CAGES blog.)