The Mind of Bryan Lee Peterson

In television, the one-hour drama is based on a four act structure. These acts are defined by the commercial breaks in between them, and usually end on a cliffhanger. The series I am working on now started off life as a hour long television drama pitch, and I did quite a bit of analysis of current shows at the time. Your average television scene is two minutes. If you time it, you’ll almost always get a scene break at every two minute mark. The first and second act have about eight scenes each, the third will have six, and the fourth will have ten. I’m sure there’s some marketing reason for this, more so than a writing choice reason. In television, you have to have your four to five commercial breaks.

I think this structure is useful in writing narratives of all sorts. In act one, the protagonist becomes aware of the problem. In act two, the protagonist becomes entangled, and this complicates the problem. In act three, the protagonist tries to solve the problem, and fails, which usually raises the stakes in some way. In act four, the protagonist must overcome all of this to solve the problem.

This formula is what I don’t like with some television shows. I’ll pick on House since it is very popular right now. At first, I really enjoyed this show. The characters were interesting, House was as sardonic as I am, the stakes in the story were very real to the characters in the story. On the other hand, the stories became so formulaic that I could almost set my watch to the patient’s seizures and the mention of lupus. I don’t watch it anymore, but my wife does, so I’m going to flip on my DVR, and as I veg out, I’ll make some plot notes. Then we can go back and do some analysis.

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Go directly to the other parts of the essay:

Part 1: Introduction

Part 2: Film

Part 3: Theater

Part 4: 4 Act Teleplay

Part 5: Aristotle

Part 6: Wrap up

This is the notes for the Compulsive Writer’s Support Group for 11-15-08. If you’d like to subscribe to the podcast, use this link:

http://www.mindofbryan.com/cwsg/feed/podcast/

Writers in general are a curious bunch of people, especially when it comes to another writer’s process. The curiosity is most often centered on outlining versus freewriting, and advice from pros is kind of spotty, and sometimes not all that helpful. I want to give some guidance and some ideas for you.

We can break writers into two different groups, or create a spectrum between these two points. Some writers are completely organic, and some are completely structured. There isn’t anything wrong with either. It’s just an individual way of working. The organic writer has no plan in mind when writing commences, and the path of the piece is discovered in the writing process. The structured writer comes up with a kernel, and may do some early exploration but tends towards finding a plot quickly, creating an outline and writing the way through. I have a tendency to feel that these are two words for the same thing in some ways, but we’ll get to that.

My word of warning is this: if you want to experiment with organic writing and you are a structured writer, you might want to pick a short subject to start with. Any sort of writing is a skill and it takes work to develop not just the skill, but the confidence to push through. A case in point from my own life was in the original writing sessions for The Hidden. We were writing television scripts, and each was 60+ pages of script, which can equate to 75 pages of novella. One of the better episodes was written by Dan Haracz, and he wrote in a very structured way, we talked out the story, had an outline and scene breakdown, and things maybe changed somewhere in the middle, but the structure was viewed as flexible and it all worked out. His next episode he decided to try to let it grow organically, and it fell apart. He wasn’t used to dealing with ideas in disparate parts of the timeline, couldn’t organize thoughts, and just kind of lost the story. I still remember the story, and have it in my head, and will write it soon. I think the failure was that he wasn’t used to writing in this manner, and so organization became an issue, but also that he didn’t have the confidence that he could push through.

I’ll tell you what I do. I’m very organic on most of my short stories. I know at the very most if I take a wrong turn, I’m going to lose 5,000 words, which for me could be a couple days, could be a couple hours. I heard one writer talking recently and he said he writes organically, and the most he’s ever had to throw out was 90,000 words. Gulp. But we have a lesson to be learned here. Don’t be afraid to write the wrong words, or the wrong story. I have had times where I knew a story was wrong, but it wouldn’t go away until I had it written out. The wrong story was a block to the right one. Beginning writers are generally afraid to set down the wrong thing, or to throw away stuff they’ve set down. Pro writers will tell you that this is quite common, an accepted part of the trade. Don’t fear it. Every word that you write makes you a better writer. Every word you don’t write puts you farther from being a good writer.

Now, I have a lot of stories floating around in my head, and they all get worked on constantly, and so the organic portion of my process happens without paper and computer. I take notes as things happen, but mostly I wait until a story is ready to be written before I write it. With as many stories as I have, that is possible. A younger writer might not have that, and so the process is much more on paper.

With longer projects, I definitely outline. I start at the beginning and usually have a good idea of where things are going from beginning to end. In fact, a lot of the time, I can’t even outline fast enough for my head. My outlines are a list of scenes with occasional bits of dialog. The descriptions may be 20-250 words, more if they have pieces of what I think will be finished text. For my next book, I think that for an expected 1000+ pages, my outline is going to be 200 pages on its own. I remember mentioning that to a friend, who was currently working on his largest project, twenty five comic pages. It blew him away. Read the rest of this entry »

Here’s something useful from io9. Original link

Secrets Of Great Characters, According To 6 Science Fiction Authors

Amazing stories need great characters. And when you’re writing a story set in a futuristic or fantastical world, it’s more important than ever for readers to be able to relate to your characters. It’s also harder than ever, because your characters’ lives and experiences will be totally different than your readers’. How do you make people identify with someone who lives in the future, or on another planet? How can your main character stand out, against a bizarre and colorful backdrop? We asked six great science fiction authors for their advice.

Get to know them as individuals, rather than types. If your characters are cut off from all the present-day cultural references, like “lawyer who went to Harvard,” then it’s even more important to think of them as individuals, says Elizabeth Bear, Campbell- and Hugo-winning author of Carnival and Undertow. “Try very hard to know them as people,” she urges. “That goes for any setting, past or present or future — or alternate reality.”

In particular, you should think, “‘This is a person who happens to have the following traits, and all that they imply,’ rather than ‘this is a nuclear physicist who grew up in Iowa.’”

Try making your characters scientists. Or at least, have them be obsessed with stuff that’s relavant to your storyline, advises Kim Stanley Robinson, Hugo- and Nebula-winning author of the Mars trilogy and the Science In The Capital series. Having scientists as your characters lets you “explore the setting and the character at once.” And it helps if your characters obsess about the mysteries and explanations in your story. They can also be obsessed with a planet, spaceship, new procedure or alien.

Base them on people you know. The most realistic characters are often based closely on your friends or people you’ve met, says Rudy Rucker, Philip K. Dick-winning author of the -Ware novels and Postsingular. That goes double for your aliens, A.I.s and robots, he adds. It’s always better to copy your friends than to lift from “received ideas about how SF characters might behave. Who wants to see yet another a humorless talking head with a BBC accent? The absolute worst thing in Matrix III was when Keanu gets to the virtual office of the Big Computer Mind, and he meets, like, a tweedy professor with a white beard. Ugh! At the very least it should have been a fat hacker in a T-shirt, preferably high on pineal extract.” Also: to make your characters stand out, try having them say quirky, unexpected things. “Forget your Star Trek memories, and remember your wild and crazy friends — the ones who say things that Make No Sense,” Rucker advises.

Give them a thought-out world. The more carefully thought out the world you’re placing your characters into, the more we’ll be able to believe that they live there, says Tobias Buckell, author of Sly Mongoose. And that also makes it easier to “contrast them against this imaginary place.”

Figure out what they love, and what they fear. Try to find what drives your characters, including what they want and need, Bear urges. And understand what traumatizes them. “I tell people I like to know what they’d want on their tombstone: that seems to give me a really good handle on who they are.”

She adds:

Characters we can relate to have fears and damage, but moreover, for me they have to be devoted to something — an ideal, a person, whatever. Even villains become much more sympathetic when we’re introduced to whatever it is that they love.

Kage Baker, author of the Company novels, agrees: “It isn’t the way a person relates to his hovercar that makes him memorable; it’s what’s going on in his heart.” No matter what planet or time you’re living in, there will be “certain constants in human existence: struggle against poverty, rebellion against authority, love and desire, loneliness, curiosity. Any reader can relate to those.” Make sure your character has loves and hatreds that readers can see themselves in, and the rest will take care of itself.

Don’t aim for larger-than-life — and overshoot. One pitfall with science fiction characters is that authors sometimes make their characters “bigger than life, or archetypal” to let them compete with the big, brash colorful worlds they live in. A common mistake is veering past archetypal, all the way into “over the top, or maybe somewhat cliche.” If you do try for archetypal characters, think of the classics from all genres, like Sherlock Holmes’ quirky genius or Captain Ahab’s drive.

Don’t obsess too much about setting and toys. If you spend pages and pages on dense descriptions of your settings and how exactly your hovercar works, you’re distracting the reader from your characters, says Baker.

It’s enough to say “He climbed into his hovercar” and your reader will get the idea. You don’t need to give a geography lesson: “They were sitting in the courtyard drinking fire-palm wine” or “She trudged back from the well, balancing her water jar” or “They looked out across the desert and saw the yellow mountains of Califia before them” all give brief, intense impressions of a place, without stopping the narrative in its tracks or drawing focus from the main character.

Find out who’s hurting. If your story involves a new situation or technological breakthrough, figure out who suffers as a result — maybe that should be your main character, says Robinson, quoting from Damon Knight (who was quoting James Blish in turn.)

Keep your characters grounded. The stranger the setting, the more ordinary your characters should be, says Terry Bisson, Hugo- and Nebula-winning author of Bears Discover Fire. “For example, in my most recent story, the narrator ‘had a job and an apartment, but that was all.’ The story wasn’t about the setting but about the character.”

Your characters should be “totally convinced they live in the present, rather than the future. Because, of course, it IS the present to them,” says David J. Williams, author of The Mirrored Heavens. Make sure your world, and your characters, both have a believable past, that anchors their present. “As Gibson said, the future’s already here, it’s just unevenly distributed. Same is true for the past: it’s always with us, but sometimes beneath the surface. How one handles that is the key to character.”

Go directly to the other parts of the essay:

Part 1: Introduction

Part 2: Film

Part 3: Theater

Part 4: 4 Act Teleplay

Part 5: Aristotle

Part 6: Wrap up

This is part 3 in my essays on writing. These will be on a podcast called The Compulsive Writer’s Support Group starting November-ish. You’ll be able to get links to it from here, as well as my site, www.mindofbryan.com.

We can look at other structures from other Mediums as well when we think about giving structure to our pieces. If you have an idea and you have no idea of how to structure it, we can think about things in acts. Giving just this much structure might give the organic writer some better concept of how to outline without interfering with their organic process. One of my degrees is in theatre, and I’m quite glad I did it, because the intense work of analyzing character and creating movements from words on a page is what gave me a good understanding of character, voice and motivation.

Theatre has a number of structures, from Beats to acts. A beat is the smallest structural unit of theatre. The story goes that when modern acting method was brought over to England and the United States by Stanislavski, he wanted to say “bit” but in his thick Russian, it came out as “Beat” and the term stuck. I believe this is a significant structural element that can be used in constructing a book as well. If we write a conversation, any kind of dialogue, we can think of turning points. Any turning point represents a beat. These points can be moments where advantage is gained or lost, information is imparted, a character loses it, or calms down. The entry of a new character almost always signifies a beat change, as does the exit.

When we look at a conversation, we should look at beats, and if things feel aimless, often that is a sign that we wrote a conversation without thinking about the structure of it, likely we spouted a lot of information without thinking about what it meant to either of the characters that said it. Exposition is tough, especially when you have a lot of it, and you feel like you have two people just spouting it off without any real reason for it. We can change that by giving them a reason to say it, give each of them a stake in it. Every beat has a beginning, and a turn. These are my terms, so you might not find them in any other places. Beats can be long or short. The centerpiece of a beat is a motivation, which literally comes down to what is this character trying to accomplish right now? When the answer to that question changes, you have a new beat. These beats are what give a story momentum and direction.

If you look at a conversation, and it feels flat, it is probably worth looking at it, and breaking it down to points where the conversation turns. If it doesn’t turn, or more importantly, turn enough times, it may not be an important conversation, and maybe you could do without it. If there is crucial plot information, you’re probably going to have to work it, to find points where significant development can happen. We as writers can very easily get lost in information, and thinking about what has to make it to the page to get the plot moving, while forgetting about developing our characters for a scene. Thinking about breaking these scenes into beats is maybe the best way to inject that development back in.

Sometimes, a beat breaks with a pause. You know that five minute lull? That is a break in a beat where the author hasn’t written the next beat yet, and that can be a great way to develop a character. If there are pauses while nothing happens, it can indicate contemplation, boredom, any number of isms that make a character tick. Somebody who is socially awkward might let this pauses drop without thinking about it, others may use it as a tool to force the other character into saying something in the uncomfortable silence.

When you string together enough beats, you get a scene. Some plays have scenes, and some don’t. Some just have action for an act and then more for another act, and one of the main elements that will dictate this is setting. One setting, one scene is often the rule. Shakespeare moves things around quite a bit, and so he writes scenes. In Waiting for Godot, Becket has a tree as a setting, and there are no breaks in action, though there are a lot of beats. Scenes are very much like what we have in our books, screenplays or other writing projects. They represent fairly major actions and movements of the story, and may be spelled out, or may be interpreted by the director. Scenes are more widely used at this point in film and books, but scenes are used extensively in theatre with origins before the mid 20th century. Read the rest of this entry »