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tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5595318266587440942018-10-08T17:59:16.112-07:001000 Ways to Save A BuckTATTOO AND BODY PAINTINGhttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-559531826658744094.post-19784838504686373052013-12-09T21:00:00.000-08:002013-12-10T00:28:01.335-08:00If the Apocalypse Comes, Will Anyone Notice?Not long ago (on 26 November) I ran an excerpt, here, from Gravity's Rainbow, Thomas Pynchon's brilliantly eccentric postmodern classic about the V-2 missile bombing of England in late 1944. I also tweeted about it and mentioned the book in an e-mail to a friend (and looked it up in a Google search once).

On 7 December, I got an e-mail from Amazon with a Subject Heading of "Gravity's Rainbow." The first part of the e-mail looks like this:

I was startled to see "Gravity's Rainbow" (just those two words) as the Subject of an e-mail from Amazon, although I guess by now I shouldn't have been. (The real question is: Does Amazon know that the copy of Pynchon I'm now reading is from the library?) Google and Amazon have been tracking our behavior, our reading preferences, our buying habits, for quite some time; and they'll only get better at refining their models, perhaps to the point where they can tell I'm about to commit a crime, before I commit it (a la Minority Report). How Pynchon would that be? (Gravity's Rainbow is all about the limits of causation and prediction; it explores the inversion of cause and effect, a theme deriving from the fact that the sound of a V-2 missile's approach is preceded by the actual explosion, due to the missile arriving faster than Mach 1.)

In its almost psychotic paranoia and unrelenting preoccupation with government research into the limits of predictability, much of Philip K. Dick's work anticipates (or does it merely echo, ahead of time?) Pynchon's landmark book—the same way daily news headlines seem to offer a plangent, time-inverted reverberation from some terrible dystopian future whose recent past we now reenact. Perhaps, as I tweeted not long ago, NSA + Google + Amazon are properly considered one entity, the data-ingestion "front end" for the coming dronepocalypse.

I recently remarked on Twitter:

I was being completely serious, because today's bizarro reality is so monstrously outrageous (our every reading habit cached in a silicon hash-tree forest, our future purchasing decisions e-mailed to us, but of course we can still opt out of a given purchasing decision should we wish to retain the illusion of free will; even so, you might want to wait, first, for Klout to finish generating your influencers; no sense going off half-cocked, old boy . . .) it would have beggared Pynchon's imagination, even if he was dreaming of Philip K. Dick reading Kafka.

Before you write dystopian fiction, do a reality check. That is to say: Make sure present-day reality doesn't already have you trumped. Broadband Bizarro is streaming live, already. Have you checked your inbox?TATTOO AND BODY PAINTINGhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-559531826658744094.post-46270168538174377942013-12-08T21:00:00.000-08:002013-12-10T00:28:01.349-08:00Please Dear God Don't Let My Influencers Be Cached

Screenshot from Klout.com showing my influencers being generated.

So I was checking my Moments Interactors on Klout.com the other day, just like every normal person does every day, okay, when a wait-message happened to catch my eye: "Influencers are being generated."

"Wait," I said to myself, confused. "LinkedIn pre-generates my influencers; they show me my influencers every day. This must mean Klout instantiates influencers lazily, just in time."

Which is probably the way it should be, because if there's one thing you don't want in your life, at this point, it's day-old influencers. Damn straight I want lazily generated influencers!

So what if you have to wait a few seconds for your influencers to be generated? That can actually be a handy thing, because (think about it) if Jehovah's Witnesses suddenly arrive at your door, you can just say: "I'd love to talk to you right now, but Klout's almost done generating my influencers."

They'll understand. I know they will.

TATTOO AND BODY PAINTINGhttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-559531826658744094.post-71819968132113314802013-12-07T21:00:00.000-08:002013-12-10T00:28:01.359-08:00The True Cost of Minimum WageBurger-flipping as a career option is the topic of a lot of jokes in America, but it's no joke to those who actually work in the fast food industry.

The following stats, from a recent report by the U.C. Berkeley Labor Center, highlight the true costs to society of keeping wages low in the fast-food sector:

More than half (52 percent) of the families of front-line fast-food workers are enrolled in one or more public programs, compared to 25 percent of the workforce as a whole. (See graphic.) This is true even when the workers in question are working 40 hours a week.

The cost of public assistance to families of workers in the fast-food industry is nearly $7 billion per year.

At an average of $3.9 billion per year, spending on Medicaid and the Children's Health Insurance Program (CHIP) accounts for more than half of these costs.

Due to low earnings, fast-food workers' families also receive an annual average of $1.04 billion in food stamp benefits and $1.91 billion in Earned Income Tax Credit payments.

People working in fast-food jobs are more likely to live in or near poverty. One in five families with a member holding a fast-food job has an income below the poverty line, and 43 percent have an income two times the federal poverty level or less.

For more stats, see this Mother Jones piece.

Of course, low wages are a problem throughout the restaurant industry, not just the fast-food piece. The problem extends to retail as well. A Walmart in Ohio recently made news when it held a food drive—for its own employees.

Industry apologists will argue, of course, that if Walmart or McDonalds had to pay $12/hr starting pay, they would go out of business. That's complete nonsense. U.C. Berkeley's Labor Center researchers have already done the arithmetic for Walmart: If Walmart were to set a pay floor of $12/hr, the average net cost increase to shoppers would be 46 cents per store visit. A similar calculation for McDonalds comes to much the same answer. (McDonalds serves 69 million orders a day through 34,000 restaurants. Figure 300 minimum-wage-hours worked per restaurant per day. Every extra dollar an hour in wages comes to 15 cents extra per customer order.)

So McDonalds, if you're listening, what's your response to this? I'd like to know. Leave a comment below.TATTOO AND BODY PAINTINGhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-559531826658744094.post-71393944705253515402013-12-06T21:00:00.000-08:002013-12-10T00:28:01.372-08:00Interesting Twitter StatsI've looked at a few stats on my 200,000+ Twitter followers, and some of them are kind of interesting.

I've always wondered how often my people are actually online, using Twitter. This is a difficult thing to quantify, but thanks to tweepi.com, I now know:

1,080 people (out of 207,000) tweeted in the last minute

2,690 tweeted in the last 5 minutes

104,400 in the last day

164,980 in the last month

The numbers are tricky, because we can't simply say that in any given 5-minute period, about 2,700 people (1.3% of 207,000 total followers) will be online, because there might be users online who don't tweet in those 5 minutes. The "online" part is suspect, too, since many people set their tweets for scheduled/automated push offline. Nevertheless, in a rough qualitative sense I think it's clear that only a very small percentage of users can be found online at a given moment. This is consistent with half my followers tweeting in a given 24-hour period (an implied average rate of 2.1% per hour; 50% divided by 24).

How many followers do my followers have?

36620 (18%) have less than 200 followers

79050 (39%) have less than 500 followers

119165 (59%) have fewer than 1000 followers

median 725 followers

If you have 7,500 followers or more, you're in the 90th percentile. I don't know if my followers are representative of Twitter as a whole, but it sounds about right to me that 90% of Twitter users have fewer than 7,500 followers.

So, but. Twitter users tend to follow more people than they have following them. The median number of followees is 1,328. Thus, it's not atypical that a person has 725 followers, but follows 1,328 people. This, again, squares with everyday observation.

Who are my top followers in terms of Follower Count? Here are the top ten:

 <colgroup><col width="62*"></col> <col width="37*"></col> <col width="157*"></col> </colgroup>

Twitter Name

Followers

Who is this?

@BarackObama

40324316

President, U.S.

@hootsuite

5528380

Twitter app.

@yokoono

4681884

The one and only.

@tonyhsieh

2842895

CEO of Zappos.

@Number10gov

2508900

David Cameron, UK Prime Minister.

@TweetDeck

2485270

Twitter app.

@firefox

2260635

The browser I use most.

@ElNacionalWeb

1767016

Venezuelan newspaper.

@thebenlandis

1657789

Songwriter.

@leopoldolopez

1614579

Leopoldo López, Venezuelan politician and economist.

Of these, I was surprised to find I actually follow only four myself.

I took a look at the Twitter users with whom I have a "mutual" relationship (i.e., where we both follow each other). Recall that Twitter relationships can be outbound, inbound, or mutual.

I have around 97,000 mutuals. To get an idea of who they are, I did some keyword searches on the user's bios. Here are the (interesting, I think) results:

 <colgroup><col width="161*"></col> <col width="95*"></col> </colgroup>

Keyword in Bio

Number of People

writer

19822

author

16725

music[ian]

10560

market[er,ing]

7800

blogg[er,ing]

5421

photograph[er,y]

4813

editor

3712

actor

3064

coach

2899

Christ[ian]

2383

CEO

2067

coffee

1622

comedian

1538

junkie

1522

actress

1201

comedy

1083

novelist

978

EMPTY (no bio)

952

screenwriter

973

chocolate

790

literary agent

71

The tricky thing here is that people don't always state their occupation (nor their interests) in their bios. For example, comedians' bios are often one-liners. (Wait. This is Twitter. Every bio is a one-liner. Never mind . . .) An actor might give the name of a show, or an imdb.com URL, or just leave the bio blank. An editor might say "I work with words" or "I translate English into English." Thus the above numbers shouldn't be taken too literally.

Why do I follow so many people? Isn't it hard to keep track of their tweets? I use lists a lot, in order to see just what comedians are tweeting, just what authors are tweeting, etc. Still, it's a lot to keep track of. On the other hand, when major news hits, I often learn about it in seconds. If Fukushima melts down, I'll know right away.

Conversely, if I need advice on something, or a research tip, I get it instantly. Once, I was trying to find out what some of the worst/funniest, most poorly conceived children's toys are. I posted a tweet asking for help. Within seconds, I got the info I was looking for.

But the real reason I follow so many people is, I consider my Twitter contacts to be a much more valuable Rolodex than, say, my LinkedIn contact list. I'm not in constant contact with my 500+ "contacts" on LinkedIn. Most of them, I haven't touched base with in years. Some are dead. My Twitter followers are very much alive (I routinely purge accounts that haven't tweeted in the last 90 days), and there for me. Many of them have reached out to me with a request; I always try to help. When I reach out, they help. It's a great system. I have thousands of people I can reach either via a public tweet, or via an e-mail that begins with "We follow each other on Twitter."

Recently, one of my followers (a movie producer) asked to see a copy of my screenplay. She read it, liked it, and is now anxious to show it to a colleague who executive-produced a recent major (well over $150 million box office gross) motion picture. This is the kind of thing that would not have happened for me without following a great many people on Twitter.

That's my excuse. What's yours?TATTOO AND BODY PAINTINGhttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-559531826658744094.post-31373768427601575512013-12-05T21:00:00.000-08:002013-12-10T00:28:01.387-08:00How I Got to 200K Twitter FollowersIn terms of basic Twitter philosophy, understanding Twitter as a medium, managing your followers, etc., Jonha Revesencio (be sure to Follow her) has written the best article I've ever seen on the subject, and it sums up a lot of what I've found to be true, in far fewer and better words than I could ever sum it up. Be sure to read her post. It's the best introduction to this post.

How Did I Get That Many Followers?
People always want to know this. The answer is really simple. You don't have to Promote your account (buy exposure), you don't have to use one of the cheesy "services" that sends thousands of sock puppets (phony users) to your Follower list. (And just to be clear: I have never purchased any followers. Nor should anyone, ever.)

The secret is this: Follow lots of other people—but at the same time, be selective about who you follow.

If you follow a bunch of like-minded people, anywhere from 20% to 40% will follow you back within 72 hours. Try it. Follow 100 people, wait 72 hours, and see how many followed you back. (I use tweepi.com for this, but there are other good tools as well.) If you're not getting at least a 20% followback rate, it could be that you're following inactive users (you want to follow people who tweet daily, not monthly), or your bio needs work, or your content is not appealing for one reason or another. Find out which it is, and fix it. Again, see Jonha Revesencio's article (link above).

With tweepi.com, you can scan up to 200 user bios in one web page, select just those people you want to follow, and click the mouse once to follow all of them. The free version supports only 20 tweeps per page. I pay the $14.95 a month fee to use the premium service, because it's worth it.

If you're starting from a small base, understand that Twitter will limit the number of people you can follow to 2000 total, initially. Don't bump up against this limit right away. Grow your list gradually. As you grow your list to 1000 and beyond, Twitter will gradually keep upping your daily-follow limit. Eventually Twitter will allow you to follow as many as 1,000 people a day (which is a hard limit; no exceptions). Twitter can and will lower your follow limit on a sliding basis based on the ratio between your Followers and Followees. But unfortunately, they don't make the algorithm public, so there's no telling exactly when/where Twitter's restrictions kick in.

A typical day in the Twitterverse (4 Dec 2013 screenshot 1:00 pm local).
Who the heck ARE all these people?? For that, see tomorrow's post.

The recipe once again: Follow a bunch of people every day; make sure they're the kind of people you want to interact with (in my case, that would be writers, actors, comedians, filmmakers, journalists, and interesting/funny/smart people in the arts and sciences); wait 72 hours; then Unfollow any Inglourious Basterds who don't follow back. Soon you'll have more followers than you know what to do with (at which point, you need to start managing Followers in categorized lists; but that's another story).

How to Know Who to Follow
Let me tell you (from personal experience) the Wrong Way to grow your list. When I first got on Twitter, I thought a good way to gain followers was to follow anyone with #Followback in their bio. I discovered that certain users keep curated Lists of such people. I also found that some Twitter personalities with large followings had/have primarily #Followback types in their Follower lists. I started following those followers. Big mistake.

What happens is, you soon find that your Follower list has grown, all right, but it's full of bots, sock puppets, scam artists, people who tweet in Japanese (or some other language you don't know), and sundry undesirables.

I've long since removed such "followers" from my list (although some creep back in, unsolicited, from time to time). I also periodically cull people who haven't tweeted in, say, two months or more, to get rid of dead accounts (which are legion, on Twitter).

My strong advice is: Think long and hard about who you want to have as followers. These are people you'll interact with, read the tweets of, and share your insights with. Do you want your twitterstream to be a jumble of random "I fed my cat just now" messages and get-rich-quick ads? Wouldn't you prefer to follow, say, 1,000 pro and semi-pro comedians, and have your twitterstream be full of hilarious, off-the-wall, often edifying (but often twisted) wisecracks, jokes, and personal takes on the day's news? If you're a writer, wouldn't you like to know what other writers are doing? If you're a journalist, wouldn't you want to be plugged in to what other journalists are saying?

Tip: Want to follow some funky people? Comedienne Sue Funke follows around a thousand sitcom writers, standup-comedy types, sit-down misery types, and miscellaneous interesting people. You can explore her colorful Followee list here.

Some Basic Analytics
I devote 44% of my 4.88 tweets per day (according to twitonomy.com) to curated links. Another 45% of my tweets are personal laments, observations, opinions, Tourette-like outbursts, etc. The rest of my tweets are interactions: shout-outs, replies, reach-outs, thank-yous, Follow Friday recommendations.

The following stats are from twitonomy.com and reflect the period 20 Feb 2012 to 3 Dec 2013.

61.6% of my tweets get Retweeted.

58.4% of my tweets get Favorited.

Just under 2,000 of my tweets got retweeted.

People retweeting me posted 14,996 individual retweets.

I was listed in 3,192 Twitter lists.

Comment: When you have a lot of followers, you can tell right away whether a given tweet is engaging. The majority of my tweets get retweeted. When I tweet something, and five minutes later I see that no one has retweeted it, it means whatever I tweeted just bombed. If I tweet a useful link, on the other hand, I can more or less count on seeing 5 or 10 retweets in five minutes. The instantaneous feedback is immensely useful. It's helped me understand what works, what doesn't, what people are expecting from me—how to provide value.

Follow Friday
There's a tradition on Twitter whereby people make Follow recommendations on Friday, using the #FF hashtag. Friday is when you tell everyone else on Twitter about that great, fantastic Twitterer you discovered on Tuesday (or whenever).

Every Friday, about 25 people mention me in #FF tweets. Whenever someone #FFs me, I thank the person in a tweet. Sometimes I thank them individually; sometimes I gang-thank them. The net effect of the #FFs is that I get free exposure to an extra 25,000 or so people each Friday, because each person that mentions me in a #FF tweet is exposing me to an average of 1,000 followers.

Note that if you institute a policy of thanking people, in public, every time you get a #FF mention, many people will start #FF-ing you every Friday in expectation of the free mention. Give it to them. Soon enough, you'll have a ton of free recurring publicity every Friday.

Tweets That Get Retweeted
What kinds of things can you say that will get you retweeted? Just about anything, if you have enough followers. But I suggest you avoid the obvious, avoid the irrelevant ("I just went to the bathroom"), be authentic, be yourself, and add value. If I tweet a news story, I check to be sure it's the best version available. (Believe it or not , sometimes the Huffpost version isn't the best.) I try never to send people to sites that have popup windows of any kind. If it's a science story, I try to dig up the original paper (if it's not paywalled) and post the URL. If the news item sounds rumorish ("Paul is dead"), I check it out first.

A lot of times, I just tweet silly nonsense-thoughts that come into my head.

Here are my top five most-retweeted tweets of the past 18 months (the top one got 168 RTs):

April 16, 2013, 10:20 am
Let's see. If Boston bomber is white, he'll be mentally ill; black, a criminal; foreign student, terrorist. #MediaProfiling #PickAStereotype

September 19, 2012, 10:20 pm
My whole life, I've never wanted to own a gun. Then I bought this Dell laptop.

September 15, 2013, 5:43 pm
Can't decide which is worse, the fact that YouTube lets people post public executions, or that they embed Marriott ads in them first.

December 2, 2013, 10:40 pm
This is the Domino's Pizza delivery test drone, for real. (via @richdownie) http://t.co/N0EgV95kSK

September 17, 2013, 4:03 pm
CAPS LOCK DOES NOT MAKE AN IDIOTIC POINT MORE VALID #NOT #EVEN #WITH #HASHTAGS

Tweets Most Favorited:

November 8, 2013, 6:56 pm
Miss America 1924 https://t.co/LVb4Z1tLy5

August 27, 2013, 4:18 pm
The 7 stages of grief, as I understand them, are: artist, writer, waiter, student, deadbeat, drunkard, corpse.

September 8, 2013, 9:22 pm
Just added "Not Killing Myself" as a LinkedIn skill.

April 16, 2013, 10:20 am
Let's see. If Boston bomber is white, he'll be mentally ill; black, a criminal; foreign student, terrorist. #MediaProfiling #PickAStereotype

September 20, 2013, 7:12 pm
Dear literary agent, I regret that I am unable to respond personally to your rejection note, which is not right for me at this time.

TATTOO AND BODY PAINTINGhttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-559531826658744094.post-7241413673066849542013-12-04T21:00:00.000-08:002013-12-10T00:28:01.401-08:00How I Do TwitterSince the last time I wrote about Twitter (four years ago), I've gained about 200,000 followers. I thought it might be time to do a series of posts on the subject. So for the next couple days, you'll be hearing about how to gain followers, how to manage Twitter content, what I've learned about how people really use Twitter, etc., with analytics (actual numbers) to back up some of the claims.

[ This paragraph is where one would insert standard disclaimers of the "your mileage may vary" variety. You can imagine what the disclaimers sound like. Listen to them. ]

You know how, when you go on Twitter, there's always this or that person tweeting "Today's stats: 5 new followers, 1 person unfollowed me, and I know who they are (etc.)"? My stats would be something like: "392 new followers, 72 persons unfollowed me, and 10 were undecided." It's a rare day that I don't get 200 to 300 new followers (or 50 unfollows). On a good day, I see 500+ new adds (a couple weeks ago, I had a 620-person day). About 20% of the 200,000+ tweeps who follow me have fewer people following them than I add during the course of the day.

I now have to be careful about what I tweet—not in a political-correctness sense (screw that!), but so the maximum number of people will understand what I'm saying.

It's no longer a question of whether I'll offend someone, but who I want to offend. With 200K people listening, anything you say is sure to offend someone, somewhere. This is actually tremendously liberating. I can basically say whatever I want and just accept the fact that whoever decides to drop off the list, I probably wanted to see go anyhow. The people who stick around (poor sick creatures!) are My Kinda People. The list becomes self-cleansing.

Nevertheless I have to be careful how I word things, because something like half my followers are outside the U.S and won't necessarily understand a Thanksgiving joke, say; while others are not native speakers of English. Believe it or not, I internationalize my tweets, to the extent I can (avoiding idiomatic phrases and jokes only known to Americans; sometimes converting units), simply so the maximum number of people can understand me unambiguously.

With 200K followers scattered across all time zones, I'm also cognizant of the fact that the overwhelming majority of people within my reach are listening later or earlier in the day than what's showing now on my watch. If I tweet at 4:00 in the morning, I know the real-time audience is EMEA and Asia-Pac plus a few West Coast late-nighters. (I don't know, but wish I did, what percentage of Twitter users follow their streams offline vs. real-time. I do know that only a small percentage of my followers are online at any given moment.) Bottom line, with users in all time zones, there's no "best time of day" for me to tweet.

I have to be conscious of things like, for example, the fact that while probably 15% of my followers are pro-Democrat, and 5% are pro-Republican, another 20% are Undecided (or don't care); but another 60% really don't care, because they live outside the U.S. to begin with. Not everyone cares about American politics.

If I gripe and moan (or joke) about a social issue, I have to ask: Will someone in Australia get this? Will someone in India know that "DMV" refers to the Department of Motor Vehicles? McDonalds is (almost) everywhere—but is there an Arby's, or a 7-Eleven, or an Albertson's supermarket, in what we, in America, call The Middle East?

Fortunately, some things are universal. When I tweet "Dear literary agent, I regret that I am unable to respond personally to your rejection note, which is not right for me at this time," people generally get it. Likewise, social media: fair game. You can say something like "I just added 'not killing myself' as a LinkedIn skill," and most Twitter people know what you're talking about. (Twitter folk tend to despise LinkedIn, BTW.)

So in tomorrow's post, I want to talk about how I got to 200,000 Followers (and how you can, too, should you happen to want to). The day after tomorrow, I'll dig deeper into analytics to look at things like: How many of my people have tweeted in the last minute? The last day? The last month? How many followers does my average follower have? Who are my top ten followers (in terms of their follower numbers)? What keywords do people tend to use most in their bios? And lots, lots more.TATTOO AND BODY PAINTINGhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-559531826658744094.post-28917267997381506392013-12-02T21:00:00.000-08:002013-12-10T00:28:01.416-08:00How to Make a Story More VisualScreenwriters resort to a variety of tricks to make stories more visual. I'm convinced novelists should be taking advantage of some of the same tricks, because adding visuality to a story almost always improves it, whether we're talking about a novel, a short story, a screenplay, an epic poem, or what have you.

Suppose you've been tasked with writing a scene in which a reluctant hero has to seek the counsel of a seer or swami or guru. He wants the guru to tell him whether he's ready to accept the hero's challenge.

The reluctant hero has to go visit the guru at the guru's ashram. Except, the ashram is really an inner-city apartment. The question isn't what you will have the two characters say to each other. The question is what they'll do during the scene. Will they sit on the floor crosslegged and talk? (How boring would that be?) Will one sit before a chessboard, rearranging chess pieces while the other stands and chews gum? Will they sit together and stare at a Tarot deck, a ouija board, a crystal ball?

In The Matrix, the guru (the Oracle) isn't a robed, bearded sage (Obi-Wan) but a laid-back, middle-aged black woman baking cookies! That's your first clue: Use the unexpected. Make things have a different appearance than the reader (or viewer) might have been expecting. Sometimes you need to signal (visually) a person's role through costume or stature, directly and obviously (as with Darth Vader), but sometimes it's more effective to do the reverse: dress the powerful in rags, bedeck the unimportant in bejeweled regalia.

Gandhi meets the Queen of England. Who is well dressed? Who has more power over India? Ho Chi Minh meets General Westmoreland. Who's wearing peasant attire? Who's winning the war?

In The Matrix, the Oracle bakes cookies, smokes cigarettes, reads Neo's palm. Neo mostly stands around and does nothing, although, significantly, he breaks a vase early in the scene. He also notices a sign over the doorway ("Know Thyself"). You might ask yourself why the scene was written to take advantage of chocolate chip cookies, cigarettes, palm-reading, a broken vase, and a sign over a doorway in a kitchen. Are these all "just props," or do they contain messages, meanings, special connotations? Ask yourself how you would have written the scene.

It's interesting that in a later Matrix movie, there's a similar scene, in which Neo gets to visit The Architect. It's one of the most laughably ineffective scenes in movie history. Why? The Architect just sits dispassionately in a chair and goes off on a bizarrely abstruse, esoteric soliloquy about the meaning and origin of The Matrix, while Neo looks at TV images of himself. This is an example of a "dialog" scene done poorly, done non-visually. The only "visual" is the wall of TV monitors, which instantly comes across as as sterile and gimmicky. The Architect's speech is totally forgettable. It's memorable for its ludricrousness. In this scene, instead of a picture painting a thousand words, we have a guy in a chair speaking a thousand words, saying nothing.

The scene in which The Architect drones on, semi-coherently, about the design of The Matrix is
arguably one of the most laughable non-comedy scenes in major motion picture history.

In making a scene work visually, you have a number of tools at your disposal, including setting, costumes, props, situations/actions, and the choice of words you (and your characters) use to convey the scene. Try not to think of these items as disjoint Cartesian bits. (To keep you from thinking of them in that way, I'm going to resist the temptation to break them out into bullet points for separate discussion.) Think in terms of the whole. Think "performance art."

Think "performance art" even if you're writing scenes for a novel.

When one character has to give another character bad news (or any significant piece of information), try doing it symbolically, with a visual. Is your character going to leave the country, only she hasn't told her partner yet? Maybe leave a passport on a desktop or dresser. The klutzy thing to do is have Mary tell Bob directly: "I'm going on a trip." How much better is it to have Bob spot the passport on his own and ask: "What's this?" Klutzy followup: Mary says "I'm going away. This is not working." Better: Mary says "Do we have any sunblock?" (Avoid the straight-on discussion.) Better still: "Can you hand me that plastic bag?" In the plastic bag, clearly visible, is a tube of sunblock. (Props, action, implication, possible symbolism. The sunblock implies Mary is heading for sunnier weather, both literally and metaphorically.)

Is someone getting fired at work? The obvious (and not terribly engaging) way to do it is to have the boss buzz the worker on the phone and say "Can you come in for a minute?" Then there's the office scene where the boss gives the you're-being-laid-off speech.

A far better way to handle it is: Mary comes in to her office and finds the desktop clean, sticky-notes gone, her items in a cardboard box. Someone pokes a head around a corner and says; "The boss wants to see you." Cut to: Joe the Boss, sitting at his desk alone in his quiet office, door closed. Maybe he's just getting off the phone with someone. With zero warning, an office chair comes crashing through the plate glass. Mary, eyes blazing, steps over the rubble. "You wanted to see me?"

Gesticulation is often better than a line of dialog. There's a wonderful scene in The Adjustment Bureau (see my analysis here), where Matt Damon's character (a young politician) flirts with his soon-to-be serious romantic partner (played by Emily Blunt) on a commuter bus. The two had met by chance (and snuck a quick kiss in a men's room) a few days before, never suspecting they'd ever meet up again; but now they've met randomly on a bus. The bus has stopped, she gets off, the bus's door is about to close, and Damon knows he has maybe 3 seconds to say whatever it is he's going to say. As the door starts to close, he blurts out, to the woman he hardly knows: "The morning after I lost the election I woke up thinking about you." She smiles sadly and gives him the finger.

Why is that an effective moment? She doesn't know yet if she should have feelings for the guy (even though they had a quick stolen-kiss moment); she doesn't know if he's telling the truth; and if he is, he's screwing up a sweet and precious, spontaneous, largely non-verbal moment by saying something that implies true love, before they've figured out if they even like each other. He's wrecking a beautiful thing by bringing up love! She should be happy, right? No. She's been there before. She knows you can mess up the most precious part of a budding relationship with heavy "true love" bullshit. She's giving the finger not just to the Matt Damon character but to all the stupid, heavyhanded, bullshit-drama crap that messes up so many delicate, wonderful things in this life.

Emily Blunt's single-finger salute said so many things (so many) that would've utterly failed, in straight dialog.

There's the famous T-Rex scene in Jurassic Park where, before we actually see the T-Rex, before the kids-trapped-in-the-car get to stare up at the beast in Lilliputian awe, we learn how big the creature is from a glass of water. We see concentric waves start to appear in the top of the water, in rhythm to the pounding of the creature's feet (still some distance away, off-camera). In this simple manner, we're told visually how incredibly massive the creature is, long before we actually see it.

The Log Lady.

If you have a crazy-old-lady character, you can show that's she crazy by having her say crazy things, but that's the easy way out. David Lynch did it with a log. Who can forget the Log Lady?

If you need to, just put physical obstacles in a character's way. Instead of your character walking across the room to get to another character, put a chair in between the two, and make him throw the chair out of the way so he can get to the other character.

And by the way, you're not still using plain-Jane verbs like "walk" or "look," are you? Your characters should be striding, tiptoeing, trotting, glancing, staring, glaring, etc., shouldn't they? Choice of vocabulary makes a difference. Some words conjure images and activity; some are lifeless.

One final comment. Every movie has what are called "trailer moments." What are your novel's trailer moments? Every novel should have some. Don't you think?

Figure out what your story's "trailer moments" are. And: See if you can't make some of them play well even with the sound off. If you can work irony and symbolism into the mix, too, so much the better.

TATTOO AND BODY PAINTINGhttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-559531826658744094.post-54464816721567601002013-12-01T21:00:00.000-08:002013-12-10T00:28:01.431-08:00More Thoughts on Visual StorytellingIn yesterday's post, I talked about the need to make fiction more visual (something I call visuality), through the use of props, setting, situation, costume, and action.

Good fiction is vivid. It conjures imagery. The weakest thing you can do is describe a scene through narrative exposition. The second weakest thing you can do is have characters "carry" the action through dialog. Good dialog is more than just characters engaging in smart, "dramatic" conversation. A memorable scene is usually memorable because of what happens visually, not orally.

Lina Wertmüller

Some screenwriters advocate writing a silent-film version of a script first, before adding dialog. For example, before finishing a script, writer-director Lina Wertmüller cuts out every line of speech and tells the whole story with visuals. When the story is sufficiently explainable through action, she adds back only the lines of dialog that are required.

Imagine what this allows you to do. When you've got a good visual story, dialog can go to the next level; you can afford to devote spoken lines to subtext, things that aren't being said, the way things are said, plus foreshadowing, back-references, innuendo, irony—you have so many things to do now, with dialog, besides carry the story.

You can try a thought experiment right now. Think of some of your favorite movies (and maybe some of your least-favorite). Which ones would still be tremendously entertaining to watch with the sound off?

Consider the first of the Star Wars movies—a visual feast from start to finish. We know, even with the sound off, that Darth Vader is the villain. The first time we see him, he's all-black, he's giving orders (and others are carrying them out), and the fact that he's a foot taller than everyone else tells us (visually) that all the Imperial soldiers around him are quite literally underlings. (Plus he of course strangles a coworker early on, which tells us this is one seriously bad dude.) The first time we see Princess Leia, we can see (with the sound off) she's being held under duress. The barroom shootout works even without subtitles. The first time we meet "Ben," he's robed, has a beard—it's pretty obvious he's a wise old man with special knowledge. The entire movie works in silent mode.

The later movies in the Star Wars series (later, as in release date) are dialog-topheavy movies that don't work nearly as well in silent mode as the original film.

The first film in the Alien series would make a very decent silent movie. The later Alien films, not so much.

Jim Carrey has been in a ton of movies. Which ones do you remember most? That's right: the ones that are highly visual. The wordplay in Dumb and Dumber is first-rate, but guess what? The movie is still funny with the sound turned off.

I'm not saying the only good movie is one that can be enjoyed with the sound off. Obviously, movies benefit from having sound. I'm saying most stories can be made better by doing the storytelling in a highly visual way.

Tomorrow, I'm going to give practical tips for boosting the visuality of your novel or screenplay. It turns out there are many ways to pry the lid off this particular can of worms.

TATTOO AND BODY PAINTINGhttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-559531826658744094.post-46502027982957890272013-12-01T10:55:00.000-08:002013-12-10T00:28:01.443-08:00Visuality: How to Make Fiction More VisualI'm firmly convinced that a solid understanding of the craft of screenwriting can only improve your fiction-writing skills. Many of the skills of good screenwriting, if transferred to novel or short story writing, make for a much-higher-impact story. I'm talking not only about story structure and dialog-related tricks, but verticality and "visuality"—making a story more vivid by making it more visual.

Visuality is something good screnwriters spend a lot of time trying to achieve. Mediocre scripts, and even some "good" scripts (of the "I like it but don't love it" variety), are often mediocre simply because they lack visual impact, relying too much on explicative dialog to move the story along. When you read one of these scripts, you get the feeling you're reading a stage play.

But even stage plays (good ones, that is) rely heavily on visuals, rather than just dialog.

Kenny Hodges in 1977.

Many years ago when I was working for The Mother Earth News, I came to be good friends with somebody at work named Kenny Hodges. Kenny was a great raconteur (I can't begin to replicate his skill here), and one of the many amazing stories he told was the story of the time he auditioned for, and landed, a part in a Broadway play.

The way he tells it, Kenny and some friends decided, on a lark, to get in line for an open reading for a play. Kenny had never done any acting. He had been a musician (the bassist in the 1960s group Spanky and Our Gang). Many people were reading for the part. The role was that of a small-town hoodlum of some kind; the reading involved dialog between the hoodlum and the county sheriff.

The dialog was fairly humdrum, the hoodlum saying to the Sheriff something like "Oh yeah? Well, you may think you're the big shot here, but you ain't got nothing, hear me? I'm the one in charge of this town. Not you."

People read for the part, one by one, and got told "Thank you" by the director (meaning: you're dismissed, have a nice day now).

I couldn't wait for Kenny to reveal the secret of how he got the part, so I interrupted him while he was telling the story and just asked him. He explained that when he got on stage to read the lines, he improvised. At the critical moment, he held out a fist, thumb pointing straight up, and said (completely off book): "See that?"

The actor playing the Sheriff stepped a little closer, looked at Kenny's thumb, and said something like "What? What's that?" Whereupon Kenny flexed his thumb and pointed to the crotch of the thumb, under the first joint, and said: "That's where you are. Right there. Right there, my friend." In essence saying "I've got you under my thumb, asshole."

It got him the part. The director had the thumb gesture written into the script. (Unfortunately, due to a musical engagement, Kenny—who never seriously thought he would get the part in the play—had to decline the role, and never got to act on Broadway.)

This is an example of the power of visuality—and the kind of thing you should be having characters do, if you're writing a script or a novel.

I'm going to continue on this theme in tomorrow's post, because there's a lot more to say about visuality and how to use it to enrich fiction.

TATTOO AND BODY PAINTINGhttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-559531826658744094.post-33533812798037607912013-11-27T21:00:00.000-08:002013-12-10T00:28:01.455-08:00Writing a ConclusionI'm sure you've noticed, if you do any significant amount of writing (and maybe even if you don't), it's much easier to write a decent beginning than a satisfying ending. Here, I'm talking about short-form nonfiction: blogs, essays, book reports, campaign speeches, and the like. (Wait. Did I say "nonfiction"? Delete campaign speeches.)

Notice I did not say beginnings are easy. If they were, my earlier piece on "How to Write an Opening Sentence" probably wouldn't have gotten 50,000+ page-views. No, my friend, beginnings are tough. But a good ending is harder. Usually. Most always.

Why is that? Why should an ending be any harder than a beginning? Maybe it's because of how the brain works. Thoughts about a subject don't just sudddenly, neatly end. More often than not, you go on rehashing and rethinking things with no clear end. "The end" happens when something else, some more pressing set of thoughts, intercedes. Our lives, our thoughts, are not full of neat resolutions.

G.K. Chesterton had a charming way of
inverting logic to prove the absurdity of things.

The easiest kind of writing to wrestle to the ground is the argumentative essay. Here, you can sum up, recap, return to the beginning, restate the thesis, or say something like "In the end, it all comes down to X. Either we accept X, or we don't. But if we reject X we have to be willing to accept Y. And that's something most people aren't ready to swallow." Or some such nonsense.

It is sometimes (though not as often as you'd think) profitable to begin a piece of nonfiction writing with a famous quotation. In reality, quotations work much better in a conclusion. You could, for example, invoke G. K. Chesterton. Chesterton once said of Christianity, "It is not that Christianity has been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult, and left untried." After quoting Chesterton, you can say: "And so it is with X. For all the well-meaning talk about X, it has yet to be tried." (Or: "Perhaps it is time X is tried in earnest.") Follow with: "If it fails, we'll know soon enough." Or: "If it fails, we will at least have tried something reasonable before going back to business as usual, which we already know doesn't work."

One of the most satisfying endings of all times occurs in the final sentence of Nora Ephron's classic Esquire essay, "A Few Words about Breasts." (Also available in PDF form here.) The essay ends this way:

 After I went into therapy, a process that made it possible for me to tell total strangers at cocktail parties that breasts were the hang-up of my life, I was often told that I was insane to have been bothered by my condition. I was also frequently told, by close friends, that I was extremely boring on the subject. And my girl friends, the ones with nice big breasts, would go on endlessly about how their lives had been far more miserable than mine. Their bra straps were snapped in class. They couldn't sleep on their stomachs. They were stared at whenever the word "mountain" cropped up in geography. And Evangeline, good God what they went through every time someone had to stand up and recite the Prologue to Longfellow's Evangeline: "... stand like druids of eld... / With beards that rest on their bosoms." It was much worse for them, they tell me. They had a terrible time of it, they assure me. I don't know how lucky I was, they say.
 I have thought about their remarks, tried to put myself in their place, considered their point of view. I think they are full of shit.
What I like about this ending is not just that it's personal, direct, and honest, but that it tapers down to a single, short, final statement, ending in a hot-button word: shit.

I saw a fine college admission essay recently in which the entire essay read like one of those Dos Equis commercials (The Most Interesting Man in the World), which is to say, it was chock full of self-aggrandizing hyperbole, outrageous stuff like "I once caught a meteor in my bare hand. I taught a unicorn to use the Obamacare website. When I met Chuck Norris, I taught him to curtsy. I have actually identified UFOs.") I've done this ridiculous thing, I've done that ridiculous thing. The final sentence of the essay was: "But I have not yet gone to college."

He got in.

If you're writing something right now and are struggling for an ending, try this: Keep just what you've got, but add a short "knock-out punch" statement, either at the end of the final paragraph, or as its own paragraph. (Note, by the way, that Nora Ephron's final sentence would have worked quite well as its own one-line paragraph.)

It's much harder to find a tidy ending for an open-ended discussion: for example, a book review (or other piece of writing that's not inherently argumentative). One possible strategy is to juxtapose the subject's strengths and weaknesses. "In Death of a Platypus, Frumpenheimer reveals himself to be a master of irony and an erudite student of the history of mime. What he lacks in humility, he makes up for in logic, and charm. He weds the wit of Thurber with the iconoclasm of Stein. The overall effect is arresting, mesmerizing, and sublime." Or "The overall effect is not to be found in any other writer of the late twentieth century," optionally followed up with: "which is why Frumpenheimer will be studied for decades, maybe centuries, to come." (Notice how breaking a sentence with commas near the very end causes the pace to slow, then stop. Compare the effect of ending the Frumpenheimer sentence at "decades.")

Commas are small pauses; they're like tapping the brakes. As you get to the end of your essay, start tapping the brakes.

I have often found it useful, when trying to bring a discussion to a close, to employ the multi-stage retro-rocket approach. This calls for a medium-length paragraph that sets up a short next-to-last paragraph, which in turn sets up a one-sentence final paragraph. It's like the retro-rocket that precedes the parachute that precedes the bouncy-balls on the Martian lander.

MARTIAN LANDER PATTERN:

 Paragraph X (retro-rocket): It's not enough to consider A or to argue B. A and B make for powerful arguments, until you consider Q and R; and then they don't have the same impact.

 Paragraph Y (parachute): The fact is, A needs to be reconsidered in the light of S. Then we may find out T.

 Paragraph Z (bouncy-ball): The alternative, U, is unthinkable.

Another pattern is to end with an anecdote, then tie it back into the discussion.

Or you can speculate. "History doesn't record whether so-and-so ever thought about the consequences of such-and-such. He/she/they certainly couldn't have foreseen ABC. But here we are, still trying to grapple with the problem of XYZ. No doubt, future generations of experts will continue to grapple with it, for years to come." Optionally: "One can hope the next generation of PQR will [find the progress that has eluded the current generation of PQR] or [see the problem in a new, and more profitable, light] or [not encounter the same stumbling blocks that make ABC such a impasse today] or [whatever]."

Listen to the Rhythm
Learn to recognize when the ball hasn't rolled to a complete stop. Quite often, what you've written, thinking or wishing you've nailed the last sentence, isn't really the last sentence. In my recent essay on The New Weird (The New Weird being an emerging—but fundamentally stillborn, IMHO—literary genre), I had written, toward the end:

It's not enough for fiction to permutate and pervert the past and serve it up again in shocking colors. Serve us up something new.
I so wanted to be able to end it right there. But I could tell, from the cadence, that the ball had not yet stopped rolling. More needed to be said. I could have added: "Something tasty. Something memorable." But it still wouldn't have felt finished. I could have added more: "I want to sup for hours, and be filled for days. As it is now, I feel malnourished." Not working. The ball's still rolling.

I decided to add yet another short paragraph. (Try to make paragraphs shorter, near the end. Sentences too. Claues within sentences, also. Give the reader subverbal cues that momentum is—in fact—gradually, gradually, slowing.)

I'm still not 100% happy with the final additional paragraph I came up with:

As a reader of fiction, I want to move beyond Tolkien-in-a-party-dress. I want the next New Weird to come without a rearview mirror. The current New Weird isn't doing it for me.
Arguably, the final sentence could have worked better as its own standalone paragraph. (Possible rewrite: "Call me Old Normal, but the New Weird isn't doing it for me.")

Possibly, I could have added yet another additional final sentence, as its own paragraph:

Then again, maybe I'm just being weird.
I could've used the circle-back technique. How? Add a new starting sentence (as its own paragraph) to the top of the essay: "If I had to sum myself up in one word, as a reader of fiction, I'm fussy." Then end the essay with a one-sentence paragraph (after all the previous bellyaching): "Like I said at the beginning. I'm fussy."

In Short
Some possible ways to end a piece of writing (by no means an all-inclusive list!):

Make a statement at the beginning of the piece, with an explicit aim of returning to it at the end. The ending revisits the beginning.

End with a question. Make a statement of how things should be, and then ask: Isn't that what most people mean by XYZ? Perhaps add: The question isn't whether we can afford to do XYZ, but whether we can afford not to.

End with a warning. "If we don't do XYZ, maybe we deserve what we get." (Or "maybe the so-and-sos will win out after all, and then Archie Bunker will be King, and we'll all be happy and live forever." New paragraph: "Probably not, though.")

Suggest a reason for hope. Tell how a situation can be improved, then: "Maybe then we'll have a free society worthy of the name. With liberty and justice for all."

Use a quotation, either as the final statement or the beginning of the final paragraph (after which, you explain why it sums up the subject in question).

Issue a call for action. "There's no reason the biggest retail corporations in the world should pay less than a subsistence wage. Minimum-wage workers of the world, unite!"

Restate the thesis in the light of everything that's been disussed. "Given the fact that XYZ, the question isn't A, but B." Optionally follow up with "And that's a choice that might not sit well with the majority of [people; Americans; voters; politicians; puppeteers]."

Use retro-rockets. Instead of a concluding paragraph, write three paragraphs, each one successively shorter.

Tap the brakes. Make your final few sentences short, or (if it's a long sentence) break it up with commas.

When in doubt, write half a dozen endings. Keep the one that deserves to live.

Then come back a day later, club that one to death, and write the real conclusion.

TATTOO AND BODY PAINTINGhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-559531826658744094.post-44115400792417065452013-11-26T08:23:00.000-08:002013-12-10T00:28:01.469-08:00The 2100-Word ParagraphAnd so, having just spent 850 words (see previous post) discussing the need for, or at least the usefulness of, verticality in writing (most particularly, screenwriting), I thought I might trot out an example of horizontality: writing that forces the reader to parse word by word by word (never paragraph by paragraph or stanza by stanza) through an extended piece of descriptive text.

The follow 2,107-word paragraph (which you can also find here) occurs in Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, a book that won the 1974 National Book Award for Fiction (and would have won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction that year, except for a passage that was deemed coprophilic). Widely considered a postmodern classic, Pynchon's idiosyncratic tribute to wartime paranoia has found a place on more than one list of 100 all-time greatest novels.

The setup: Two characters, Roger and Jessica, have come upon a church in the countryside outside Kent, England on a Sunday evening. World War II is in its final year. During a hymn, Jessica lapses into a dreamlike fugue state.

Advent blows from the sea, which at sunset tonight shone green and smooth as iron-rich glass: blows daily upon us, all the sky above pregnant with saints and slender heralds' trumpets. Another year of wedding dresses abandoned in the heart of winter, never called for, hanging in quiet satin ranks now, their white-crumpled veils begun to yellow, rippling slightly only at your passing, spectator . . . visitor to the city at all the dead ends . . . Glimpsing in the gowns your own reflection once or twice, halfway from shadow, only blurred flesh-colors across the peau de soie, urging you in to where you can smell the mildew's first horrible touch, which was really the idea—covering all trace of her own smell, middleclass bride-to-be perspiring, genteel soap and powder. But virgin in her heart, in her hopes. None of your bright-Swiss or crystalline sea son here, but darkly billowed in the day with cloud and the snow falling like gowns in the country, gowns of the winter, gentle at night, a nearly windless breathing around you. In the stations of the city the prisoners are back from Indo-China, wandering their poor visible bones, light as dreamers or men on the moon, among chrome-sprung prams of black hide resonant as drumheads, blonde wood high-chairs pink and blue with scraped and mush-spattered floral decals, folding-cots and bears with red felt tongues, baby-blankets making bright pastel clouds in the coal and steam smells, the metal spaces, among the queued, the drifting, the warily asleep, come by their hundreds in for the holidays, despite the warnings, the gravity of Mr. Morrison, the tube under the river a German rocket may pierce now, even now as the words are set down, the absences that may be waiting them, the city addresses that surely can no longer exist. The eyes from Burma, from Tonkin, watch these women at their hundred perseverances—stare out of blued orbits, through headaches no Alasils can ease. Italian P/Ws curse underneath the mail sacks that are puffing, echo-clanking in now each hour, in seasonal swell, clogging the snowy trainloads like mushrooms, as if the trains have been all night underground, passing through the country of the dead. If these Eyeties sing now and then you can bet it's not "Giovinezza" but something probably from Rigoletto or La Boheme—indeed the Post Office is considering issuing a list of Nonacceptable Songs, with ukulele chords as an aid to ready identification. Their cheer and songfulness, this lot, is genuine up to a point—but as the days pile up, as this orgy of Christmas greeting grows daily beyond healthy limits, with no containment in sight before Boxing Day, they settle, themselves, for being more professionally Italian, rolling the odd eye at the lady evacuees, finding techniques of balancing the sack with one hand whilst the other goes playing "dead"—cioé, conditionally alive—where the crowds thicken most feminine, directionless . . . well, most promising. Life has to go on. Both kinds of prisoner recognize that, but there's no mano morto for the Englishmen back from CBI, no leap from dead to living at mere permission from a likely haunch or thigh—no play, for God's sake, about life-and-death! They want no more adventures: only the old dutch fussing over the old stove or warming the old bed, cricketers in the wintertime, they want the semi-detached Sunday dead-leaf somnolence of a dried garden. If the brave new world should also come about, a kind of windfall, why there'll be time to adjust certainly to that . . . But they want the nearly postwar luxury this week of buying an electric train set for the kid, trying that way each to light his own set of sleek little faces here, calibrating his strangeness, well-known photographs all, brought to life now, oohs and aahs but not yet, not here in the station, any of the moves most necessary: the War has shunted them, earthed them, those heedless destroying signalings of love. The children have unfolded last year's toys and found reincarnated Spam tins, they're hep this may be the other and, who knows, unavoidable side to the Christmas game. In the months between—country springs and summers—they played with real Spam tins—tanks, tank-destroyers, pillboxes, dreadnoughts deploying meat-pink, yellow and blue about the dusty floors of lumber-rooms or butteries, under the cots or couches of their exile. Now it's time again. The plaster baby, the oxen frosted with gold leaf and the human-eyed sheep are turning real again, paint quickens to flesh. To believe is not a price they pay—it happens all by itself. He is the New Baby. On the magic night before, the animals will talk, and the sky will be milk. The grandparents, who've waited each week for the Radio Doctor asking, What Are Piles? What Is Emphysema? What Is A Heart Attack? will wait up beyond insomnia, watching again for the yearly impossible not to occur, but with some mean residue—this is the hillside, the sky can show us a light—like a thrill, a good time you wanted too much, not a complete loss but still too far short of a miracle . . . keeping their sweatered and shawled vigils, theatrically bitter, but with the residue inside going through a new winter fermentation every year, each time a bit less, but always good for a revival at this season. . . . All but naked now, the shiny suits and gowns of their pubcrawling primes long torn to strips for lagging the hot-water pipes and heaters of landlords, strangers, for holding the houses' identities against the winter. The War needs coal. They have taken the next-to-last steps, attended the Radio Doctor's certifications of what they knew in their bodies, and at Christmas they are naked as geese under this woolen, murky, cheap old-people's swaddling. Their electric clocks run fast, even Big Ben will be fast now until the new spring's run in, all fast, and no one else seems to understand or to care. The War needs electricity. It's a lively game, Electric Monopoly, among the power companies, the Central Electricity Board, and other War agencies, to keep Grid Time synchronized with Greenwich Mean Time. In the night, the deepest concrete wells of night, dynamos whose locations are classified spin faster, and so, responding, the clock-hands next to all the old, sleepless eyes—gathering in their minutes whining, pitching higher toward the vertigo of a siren. It is the Night's Mad Carnival. There is merriment under the shadows of the minute-hands. Hysteria in the pale faces between the numerals. The power companies speak of loads, war-drains so vast the clocks will slow again unless this nighttime march is stolen, but the loads expected daily do not occur, and the Grid runs inching ever faster, and the old faces turn to the clock faces, thinking plot, and the numbers go whirling toward the Nativity, a violence, a nova of heart that will turn us all, change us forever to the very forgotten roots of who we are. But over the sea the fog tonight still is quietly scalloped pearl. Up in the city the arc-lamps crackle, furious, in smothered blaze up the center-lines of the streets, too ice-colored for candles, too chill-dropleted for holocaust . . . the tall red busses sway, all the headlamps by regulation newly unmasked now parry, cross, traverse and blind, torn great fistfuls of wetness blow by, desolate as the beaches beneath the nacre fog, whose barbed wire that never knew the inward sting of current, that only lay passive, oxidizing in the night, now weaves like underwater grass, looped, bitter cold, sharp as the scorpion, all the printless sand miles past cruisers abandoned in the last summers of peacetime that once holidayed the old world away, wine and olive-grove and pipe-smoke evenings away the other side of the War, stripped now to rust axles and brackets and smelling inside of the same brine as this beach you cannot really walk, because of the War. Up across the downs, past the spotlights where the migrant birds in autumn choked the beams night after night, fatally held till they dropped exhausted out of the sky, a shower of dead birds, the compline worshipers sit in the unheated church, shivering, voiceless as the choir asks: where are the joys? Where else but there where the Angels sing new songs and the bells ring out in the court of the King. Eia—strange thousand-year sigh—eia, warn wir da! were we but there . . . The tired men and their black bellwether reaching as far as they can, as far from their sheeps' clothing as the year will let them stray. Come then. Leave your war awhile, paper or iron war, petrol or flesh, come in with your love, your fear of losing, your exhaustion with it. All day it's been at you, coercing, jiving, claiming your belief in so much that isn't true. Is that who you are, that vaguely criminal face on your ID card, its soul snatched by the government camera as the guillotine shutter fell—or maybe just left behind with your heart, at the Stage Door Canteen, where they're counting the night's take, the NAAFI girls, the girls named Eileen, carefully sorting into refrigerated compartments the rubbery maroon organs with their yellow garnishes of fat—oh Linda come here feel this one, put your finger down in the ventricle here, isn't it swoony, it's still going . . . Everybody you don't suspect is in on this, everybody but you: the chaplain, the doctor, your mother hoping to hang that Gold Star, the vapid soprano last night on the Home Service programme, let's not forget Mr. Noel Coward so stylish and cute about death and the afterlife, packing them into the Duchess for the fourth year running, the lads in Hollywood telling us how grand it all is over here, how much fun, Walt Disney causing Dumbo the elephant to clutch to that feather like how many carcasses under the snow tonight among the white-painted tanks, how many hands each frozen around a Miraculous Medal, lucky piece of worn bone, half-dollar with the grinning sun peering up under Liberty's wispy gown, clutching, dumb, when the 88 fell—what do you think, it's a children's story? There aren't any. The children are away dreaming, but the Empire has no place for dreams and it's Adults Only in here tonight, here in this refuge with the lamps burning deep, in pre-Cambrian exhalation, savory as food cooking, heavy as soot. And 60 miles up the rockets hanging the measureless instant over the black North Sea before the fall, ever faster, to orange heat, Christmas star, in helpless plunge to Earth. Lower in the sky the flying bombs are out too, roaring like the Adversary, seeking whom they may devour. It's a long walk home tonight. Listen to this mock-angel singing, let your communion be at least in listening, even if they are not spokesmen for your exact hopes, your exact, darkest terror, listen. There must have been evensong here long before the news of Christ. Surely for as long as there have been nights bad as this one—something to raise the possibility of another night that could actually, with love and cockcrows, light the path home, banish the Adversary, destroy the boundaries between our lands, our bodies, our stories, all false, about who we are: for the one night, leaving only the clear way home and the memory of the infant you saw, almost too frail, there's too much shit in these streets, camels and other beasts stir heavily outside, each hoof a chance to wipe him out, make him only another Messiah, and sure somebody's around already taking bets on that one, while here in this town the Jewish collaborators are selling useful gossip to Imperial Intelligence, and the local hookers are keeping the foreskinned invaders happy, charging whatever the traffic will bear, just like the innkeepers who're naturally delighted with this registration thing, and up in the capital they're wondering should they, maybe, give everybody a number, yeah, something to help SPQR Record-keeping . . . and Herod or Hitler, fellas (the chaplains out in the Bulge are manly, haggard, hard drinkers), what kind of a world is it ("You forgot Roosevelt, padre," come the voices from the back, the good father can never see them, they harass him, these tempters, even into his dreams: "Wendell Willkie!" "How about Churchill?" "'Arry Pollitt!") for a baby to come in tippin' those Toledos at 7 pounds 8 ounces thinkin' he's gonna redeem it, why, he oughta have his head examined . . .
It's hard to know what a modern-day literary agent (or one of their interns) would make of such a passage, so "wordy" by modern standards, so unapologetically given to the use of acronyms, obscure references, bits of Italian. (Note: Unless you're Italian, you probably didn't spot the rare Pynchon slip-up: He said cioé —immediately before "conditionally alive"—when he meant cioè, which in Italian means "that is to say," akin to the Latin neologism videlicet, usually shortened to viz.) And the book itself: so steadfastly storyless, interspersed with obtuse bits of half-dialog and soliloquy, characters wandering lazily in and out of flashbacks and reality, no discernible plot per se (other than the implied one of WWII itself), much less any "reversals," twists, or last-minute reveals . . . 300,000 words of meandering—and mostly horizontal—prose.

In any case. Not all verticality is good; not all horizontality is bad. Prose can and should go in whichever direction(s) it needs to go. Only, have a regard for the reader. If the road is bumpy, be sure the reader is strapped in tight. Make it impossible for him or her to be left behind.

Then let it rip.TATTOO AND BODY PAINTINGhttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-559531826658744094.post-21462463960953194362013-11-22T08:56:00.000-08:002013-12-10T00:28:01.528-08:00VerticalityIn studying screenwriting, I'm struck time and again by how many tricks of good screenwriting can be carried over to traditional fiction writing (stories, novels, novellas), often to the great benefit of the latter.

A common complaint about bad screenplays is that they're a lot of work to read, because the author spends too much time in flowery descriptive narrative. You can tell when you're reading one of these scripts: It takes you two minutes—instead of 30 or 40 seconds—to get through a page. (Once you've read some really fine scripts, and felt their rhythm, you can sense the snail-like rhythm of a "stinker" script instantly.)

Page 2 of the Alien script (shooting version).

In the screenwriting world, we say that bogged-down scripts often lack verticality. (Charles Deemer gives an excellent summary in his post on "Making Scripts Vertical.") The idea comes down to this: Your eye spends an awful lot of time, in a slow-moving piece of writing, simply going from left to right (LTR), parsing word by word through one sentence after another after another. (Obviously I'm talking about English and other alphabetic/LTR languages.) This is what one might call horizontality; it's the basis of all alphabetic-LTR writing, because letters and words occur sequentially. But every once in a while, your eye gets to drop down vertically on the page—when there's a new paragraph, a subhead, a section break, a new chapter heading, an inserted block quote, a bulleted list, etc. Anything that makes your eye drop down is verticality.

Your brain keeps track of the ratio of verticality to horizontality. It begins to ache after a while if there's not enough verticality.

Horizontality is tiring. Why? Because it's linear, and that's not how cognition works. Processing linear text requires a highly specialized area of the brain. Perception (involving the senses of the body in conjunction with the whole brain) results from experiences taken in episodically, not always in a particular order, as a collage of disjoint bits that may include memories, ideas, emotions, smells, sounds, what have you.

Many of the great art movements of the early twentieth century can be understood in the context of an escape from the shackles of linearity. A photo, like a reaistic painting, maps one area of light or dark (in the photo) to a similar area in the subject; in fact the verb "map" implies linearity of just this sort. Impressionism attempts to break from linearity so as to allow the brain to do what it does best: assemble meaning from disjoint bits. Likewise, a common stylistic trope of postmodern fiction is the telling of a tale as a pastiche of disconnected and not always time-ordered pieces. This sort of storytelling (think The English Patient) engages the brain in a different way than straight narrative, often to stunning effect, since nonlinear processing centers of the brain are enlisted in the attempt to render the overall meaning.

If you have any doubt as to how hard (cognitively speaking) linear, horizontal writing is for the brain, try reading the scroll version of Kerouac's On the Road (available in the 50th anniversary edition from Viking/Penguin), the version that reflects Kerouac's original rendering of the story as a single long paragraph. Somewhere around ten pages into the 300-page-long paragraph, you'll be wishing for an indent, a section break, or some other "break" from linearity. The single-long-paragraph device takes getting used to.

Screenplays are intrinsically highly verticalized. They're broken up into short pieces that vary a great deal in terms of indents and margins. Thus they tend to be much easier to read quickly than a novel. But (as I said earlier) even among screenplays, there are those that read easily and those that feel like work.

Take, for example, the following bit of narrative, adapted from Alien:

Dallas, Kane and Lambert, each wearing gloves, boots, and jackets, enter the air lock. All three are carrying laser pistols. As Kane touches a button, a servo begins to whine and the inner door quietly slides shut; then the trio pull on their helmets.
That's not how the scene appears in the final version of the script (written by Walter Hill and David Giler, based on an earlier screenplay by Dan O'Bannon). Here's how the script was written:

Dallas, Kane and Lambert enter the lock.
All wear gloves, boots, jackets.
Carry laser pistols.
Kane touches a button.
Servo-whine.
Then the inner door slides quietly shut.
The trio pull on their helmets.
Telegraphic; staccato; almost poem-like. The "before" version is what you'd read in a novel (or a not-so-great screenplay). The second version, from the Hill-Giler script, is experiential, sensory in its telling. Two entirely different ways of handling the same content; two ways for the brain to process the information.

In your novel (you know, that one you've been working on all month?), before you get too tied up in Proustian 900-word sentences and Pynchonesque paragraphs that ramble on for pages, have a regard for the cognitive load imposed by linearity. Consider introducing a little more verticality.

Lighten the load.

Your reader will thank you.TATTOO AND BODY PAINTINGhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-559531826658744094.post-67745997999257275822013-11-20T12:25:00.000-08:002013-12-10T00:28:01.590-08:00The New WeirdLast night I was looking at The New Weird, a collection of fiction, edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer, and after reading a couple of stories (and some essays in the book) on the New Weird, a variety of thoughts came to me about the state of fiction today (not that anyone can claim to know the "state of fiction today," of course, but that's partly the point). I should mention that my thoughts were also, in part, moved along by a Huffpost review I happened to read last night—by U. Wisc. Green Bay Professor Harvey J. Kaye—of Josef Joffe's The Myth of America's Decline. Professor Kaye, who follows me on Twitter, pointed me to the review. It's an excellent review, although I respectfully disagree with many assumptions in it; and because the review was so excellent, I won't be reading Joffe's book now that I know how absurdly outmoded its assumptions are. (More of which, in a minute.)

What all this got me to thinking about is: Where is fiction headed? Where is it now? Where should new writers of fiction consider going?

My first route to prying the lid off these questions was to try to get to the core of New Weird. Which is an adventure in itself.

What is New Weird? Why does it exist? What audience-need does it serve? This turns out to be a difficult set of questions. There is no New Weird Manifesto, no elevator pitch that reduces it to a neat logline, but the VanderMeers say it's "a type of urban, secondary-world fiction that subverts the romanticized ideas about place found in traditional fantasy, largely by choosing realistic, complex real-world models as the jumping off point for creation of settings that may combine elements of both science fiction and fantasy." In terms of signature works, China Tom Miéville's Perdido Street Station is oft-cited as prototypically New Weird, along with works by M. John Harrison and even Clive Barker.

In terms of common elements, New Weird seems to involve, more often than not, an alternate reality or alternate society (optionally on an alternate planet) with new rules of behavior (optionally magical, but more often than not simply cultural and/or state-imposed), with characters that may or may not have special abilities or powers, special body modifications (a la Clive Barker), special quests. Elaborate world-building is thus a mainstay, a la Tolkien. In terms of basic storytelling, all the usual Joseph Campbell tropes (hero's quest, etc.) apply, along with common-sense storytelling best practices.

As I survey the New Weird landscape, I don't see a whole lot new, honestly, so much as a tedious (if admirably elaborate) reskinning of the Old Weird, going back to Poe and Lovecraft, with heavy debts, also, to Aldous Huxley, Kafka (The Metamorphosis), Orwell, Ellison, Dick, and others. The cultural reorganization of society along NewWeirdian lines that one sees in things like Perdido Street Station (or Miéville's story Jack, in The New Weird) feels, on some level, instantly stale to me. But that only makes me more anxious to understand why it feels fresh to others.

The New Weird is clearly an attempt to break out of the thematic tropes of mid-twentieth-century fiction, but it already feels stillborn in its quest to take Tolkien in more phantasmagoric directions, precisely because of its slavish insistence on making characters behave in accordance with elaborate (and supposedly fresh) systems of rules (cultural or state-imposed; less frequently self-imposed) in their "new worlds." The early and mid-twentieth century fascination with the apparatus of bureacracy (Kafka, Orwell, Heller, Pynchon) seems to trudge on, in different clothing and in deeper mud, in The New Weird. In terms of success in breaking away from conventional thematic tropes and techniques, it strikes me that bizarro fiction—with its frequent recourse to absurdism, surrealism, and proto-Dada grotesquerie—comes much closer to missing the dart board (where missing the dartboard is, in fact, the aim).

Earlier I mentioned Professor Kaye and his incisive review, "Whither America," which speaks to the themes of grotesque nationalism (my term, not his) explored in Josef Joffe's The Myth of America's Decline. The out-of-date sociological metrics by which Joffe analyzes America's "Policeman of the World" and "Default Culture" (my term) status evoke in me the same frustration (and, at times, abhorrence) I feel with NewWeirdian fiction vis-à-vis its slavish dependence on externally supplied (and sometimes quite archaic and baroque) sociological rule-systems. Apparently the Policeman of the World meme (brutally and dangerously archaic as it is) still resonates with certain nonfiction audiences the way Kafka still resonates with fiction audiences, the latter being (from my point of view) far more comprehensible. But in both domains (fiction and soiological nonfiction), readers still harbor the hangover of nationalism, heard in the ever-reverberating echoes of Orwell; and I think it serves modern audiences—and the common literary weal—ill to continue to pay homage to the dead bronze statues that so gravenly mark our progress in literature.

The story of the last thousand years in human history is largely the story of nationalism—the aggregation of peoples and ideologies under "state" banners with messy borders crudely drawn in blood. It's thus in no way surprising that the vagaries of militarism—and (in peacetime) the apparatus of control—have so preoccupied the literary mind over this timeframe, with some of the most famous signposts in all of western literature having names like War and Peace and Gravity's Rainbow (the latter denoting the parabolic arc of the V-2 missile in WWII). To be sure, fiction has also during this time produced significant tonnage of highly personal and psychological works, novels having more to do with issues of character and interpersonal dynamics; and such works will always be relevant, because they cut quickly to the bare-naked core of human existence, stripped of its geopolitical underwear, as it were. But the question is why we cling so lovingly to the cold stiff corpse of State and/or External Authority as the controlling factor in characters' everyday worlds; more particularly, why do we seek refuge in archaic-feeling representations (no matter how lovingly and elaborately permutated) of externally validated rule systems? (Externalism of this kind arguably reached its apotheosis in The Matrix.) How many flavors of Tolkien or Frank Herbert (or Kafka or Orwell) do we need, going forward?

Systems of Control are still relevant, but not (IMHO) as represented in the "world-building" narratives of NewWeirdism or OldWeirdism. The current world is, in fact, much weirder than any of that already. The Systems of Control of today are not explicit manifestations of state nor ideology. They are far more subtle (and dangerous), obtaining legitimacy directly from the suppressed and exploited (that's you, that's me) through their passive assent. No law, no explicit form of coercion, makes you eat at McDonalds (or order, with your Happy Meal, more soda than the human stomach can reasonably process). And yet America the Superpower, America as Default Nation, along with most constitutional democracies in the world (most countries templated on American politics), is happy to allow its citizenry to be obese, diabetic, sclerotic, and cancer-prone. No law explicitly requires you to buy Chinese goods at Walmart (or for that matter to take a minimum-wage job at Walmart). And yet your host nation has you wearing cheap foreign-made clothing, and using foreign-made electronics, while the underlying jobs (not just grunt-labor jobs but "good" jobs in technology) are shipped out of the country. No law requires you to go hungry in the greatest food-exporting nation on earth, yet one in six Americans requires Food Stamps.

To see more clearly the desolate bus stop on history's joyride that we've come to, it might help to roll back the tape and put your mind inside the head of a Thomas Paine, say, or a Rousseau or Voltaire. Suppose, in 1770, as Paine, you were to read a "speculative fiction" novel (supposing such a thing existed at the time) about a future nation-state, the Greatest Country on Earth, in which printing presses have largely disappeared (recall that as late as 1975, printing was the most prolific business type in America), "pamphleteering" has become obsolete, and citizens consume the majority of their reading matter by means of magical devices coupled to the Great Interconnector. Further suppose that although literacy has become universal, citizens of this strange future country spend a good time watching "visual replicas of plays" (films, videos) instead of reading, and the majority of citizens who choose to spend any time writing (hundreds of millions worldwide) are reduced to filing dispatches of only a few hundred characters at a time (Twitter and Facebook updates). Now imagine that in this strange future-world, people live to be 80 instead of 50, and yet a third of the citizenry is sick with obesity-related illnesses (not just diabetes but heart disease and cancer). Fully a quarter of the population takes daily pills for "high blood pressure," diabetes, or melancholia. People are required by Tithe Laws to give a tenth of their income to the state, which spends a good deal of the money on foreign wars devoted to dubious goals (goals that would not have been compehensible in Paine's day). Meanwhile, average citizens incur crushing debt to obtain an education, then are not hired for their knowledge or skills; they obtain degrees in "political science" or philosophy or literature, but go to work for inconcceivably large corporations, doing incredibly menial things; many of the jobs paying an unconscionably low "minimum wage" that has one in six persons dependent on public munificence for food.

These sorts of "future-world" facts would have seemed absurd to anyone of Paine's generation. What would have seemed most preposterous of all to Paine, in particular, is the notion that huge masses of people would not be marching on their governments in revolt!

Paine would have considered deeply troubling the geopolitical yardsticks by which a Josef Joffe measures a nation's stature: military budget, GNP, hegemonic domination of world politics, etc. He would have identified strongly with measures of infant mortality, wellness, general happiness, opportunity (he would have loathed the term "upward mobility," however), poverty rates, hunger, incarceration rate—all areas where America consistently ranks poorly.

To the extent that writers of fiction are envisioners of the future, or at least envisioners of alternate worlds, it seems to me we fail our readers if we tether our worldview to the soggy mire of militarism or nationalism (in any of its guises). Given that the social milieu is an Unseen Main Character in novels that build new worlds, it would seem appropriate to take stock of current Control Structures and build worlds that resonate with the issues that pertain to the modern inhabitants of those structures, many of whom have been brainwashed that slavery is freedom (or vice versa), ignorance is strength, war is peace, etc. By the old measures, America is still the greatest country on earth. By any rational measure it's arguably the most broken country on earth. By buying into old notions we break fiction itself and render it a self-parody. Society is evolving. Nationalism as a concept is fading. The Control Structure conventions of yesteryear are like a once-magnificent cake that's been sitting all day in the rain. Why must we continue to eat from it?

It's not enough for fiction to permutate and pervert the past and serve it up again in shocking colors. Serve us up something new. If weirdness is a necessary ingredient, just look around.

As a reader of fiction, I want to move beyond Tolkien-in-a-party-dress. I want the next New Weird to come without a rearview mirror. The current New Weird isn't doing it for me.TATTOO AND BODY PAINTINGhttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-559531826658744094.post-17547246296879898472013-11-16T08:58:00.000-08:002013-12-10T00:28:01.651-08:00Tapping Your Inner PuppetLately I've been reading a terrific book called Now Write! Screenwriting (2010, Tarcher/Penguin), edited by Sherry Ellis and Laurie Lamson. It's a collection of short (one to four pages long) tips from various successful screenwriters, presented in the form of exercises. In addition to practical advice on story construction, the tips and exercises are meant to help with ideation; hence the book is potentially of great help to any writer, in any form or genre.

I won't (can't) attempt to recap the book's tips here. If you're a fiction writer, go seek out the book, either at a bookstore or the library. You'll thank me later.

After reading a few of the essays in Now Write! Screenwriting, I started ideating. Here (below) is one idea that came to me. Warning: Not fully baked. Intake of half-baked ideas may lead to intestinal and/or intracranial distress. Consume at your own risk.

[ begin weird idea ]

A twenty-something cubicle drone from Cupertino whom we'll call Tyler Schremp, having fallen into a deep existential depression triggered by the sudden passing of Cordelia, his pet chinchilla, decides to seek psychotherapy. He has had depression, episodically, all his life. In terms of therapies and meds, he's been through the mill. Nothing works. It's all palliative, at best.

Schremp gets a tip from a trusted friend of the family, a retired therapist, who recommends the "ultimate last resort," a therapy known as Bosonic Avatar Therapy, or BATTY, practiced by its developer, Dr. Egon Pringle. ("I understand BAT. But what does the 'TY' stand for?" Answer: "It stands for Thank Your lucky stars." "But in that case shouldn't it be BATTYLS?" "Look, do you want the therapy or not? It's just a goddam mnemonic.")

Schremp seeks Pringle out and finds him to be (how shall we say) a tad eccentric. But he comes highly recommended. Diplomas, publications, awards, etc. Pringle hands Schremp a puppet. "This is your starter avatar. It's rough, I know. It'll have to do for now. We'll get you a proper avatar, one that looks like you, soon enough."

Pringle explains that for proper disjunction of the subconscious anti-self, it is crucial that all therapy be conducted via the avatar. In other words, Schremp sits on a rug on the floor next to a couch, and he has to lay the puppet down on the couch and speak through the puppet. Pringle, in turn, produces a Freud puppet (with cigar) and speaks only through the Freud avatar.

"Back me up a second," Schremp says . "What does it mean, this 'Bosonic Avatar' stuff --"

The Freud puppet moves its mouth: "Please state your question through your avatar."

Schremp moves his puppet's mouth: "Okay, sorry. What does Bosonic mean?"

Freud-puppet: "My God, man, did you not take elementary physics in school? What the hell college did you go to? Surely you know that the universe is constructed, broadly speaking, of only two types of particles: leptons and bosons. Light and heavy. Electronics are leptons. That's what makes your brain work, electricity. Bosons are protons and other heavy forms of matter. Solid stuff. That chair. The rug you're sitting on. The air you breathe."

Schremp-puppet: "Air isn't a solid."

Freud-puppet: "This is why you need my help! You're not perceiving reality correctly."

Fast-forward a couple weeks. Schremp is now (under doctor's orders) carrying around with him, 24/7, a Schremp-puppet, 100% Schremp-like down to the Sad-Sacky sunken eyes, complete with a miniature iPhone in its pocket. Coworkers give him odd looks. When he needs to express his true feelings, Schremp has to use the puppet (avatar). The avatar mouths off to people. Schremp's supervisor at work is increasingly annoyed.

Schremp finds himself at a bar after work, wanting to drown his sorrows.

Schremp-avatar: "Do you serve ventriloquists here?"

Bartender: "Yeah, sure."

"Well, I'll have a vodka martini, and my big dummy friend here will have a root beer."

"Sorry, we don't serve root beer."

"Make it a black Russian then."

A short distance away, at the bar, is a sullen-looking, nerdly young woman, sipping a pina colada. Next to her is a puppet replica of her, with a shot glass in front of it containing tequila and a rubber worm.

Schremp-puppet to nerdgirl-avatar: "Does your friend come here often?"

Nerd-girl avatar to Schremp-puppet: "One woodpecker joke and I'm outa here."

Schremp-puppet: "How's the Bosonic Avatar thing working out for you two?"

"We're fucking shit-faced, how do you think it's working out?"

And so on.

When Dr. Pringle has decided individual therapy has gone far enough, he insists that Schremp and his avatar progress to the next phase: group.

Ten patients sit in a circle, each one holding a puppet-clone of him/herself. One of the patients is a Muslim woman with full-body burka. Her puppet also wears a full-body burka.

And so it goes, until months later, Schremp (who has made little progress with his depression except that he has begun to write comedy routines in his spare time; but meanwhile he's increasingly suicidal) hears from Pringle, during a session, that his avatar is deeply disturbed and needs special therapy.

"Wait," Schremp-puppet says. "What are you saying? I'm just speaking through my partner..."

Dr. Pringle's Freud-puppet, to the Schremp-puppet: "Partner schmartner. YOU are now the patient here, your partner is fine. YOU, I'm deeply concerned about. You need intensive therapy, immediamente. ¿Comprende? Don't make me Baker-Act you."

"The Baker Act is only in Florida."

"Nonsense! I can commit you both to an instutition, right now, if that's what you want."

"All right, all right. What are you suggesting, exactly?"

Dr. Pringle, through his puppet, hands Schremp a card.

"I want you to see this man. He's an eminent puppetologist, the best in the city."

"You mean --"

"Yes, your avatar is in serious need of deep Contrabosonic Therapy, CBT. I'll make the appointment for you right now."

Dr. Pringle tries to dial a number with the Freud-puppet. When it doesn't work, he tosses the Freud puppet aside and the puppet's lit cigar starts a fire on the desk.

Eventually, Schremp ends up in the office of a Dr. Yung, who operates a Jung puppet. This time, the Schremp puppet sits on a rug while Schremp lies on a couch. Schremp must pretend that the rug puppet is a ventriloquist making him speak.

[ end of ideation ]

Now obviously, the story needs a lot of work. The nerdy-girl has to figure into Schremp's life in a big way and there need to be additional minor characters (a best friend, someone in the office who's a friend, maybe an ex-) who can help steer Schremp through the madness that's become his life. Maybe at the end, the bartender whips out his bartender puppet and offers some poignant advice, the kind you can only get from a bartender-puppet.

I'll see how far I can take it. For therapy's sake.

TATTOO AND BODY PAINTINGhttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-559531826658744094.post-52508990620496221032013-11-08T21:00:00.000-08:002013-12-10T00:28:01.714-08:008 Rules for Better DialogWhen I was an undergrad at the University of California, Irvine, I was privileged to take a course in playwriting under William Inge, who won an Oscar for Splendor in the Grass and a Pulitzer for Picnic. For ten weeks, ten of us wrote one-act plays, then listened to Inge read from them.

William Inge

Inge had emphysema (he smoked continuously throughout class), wheezing more than talking. He could barely speak. What I most remember him saying, as he looked up from someone's homework assignment, is: "Do real people talk like this?"

 Good dialog is hard. Finding out how bad a piece of written dialog is usually requires nothing more than reading it aloud. (Actors are a help. But in a pinch, you can just stand in front of the mirror.) Still, it's surprising how much bad dialog you can find in novels, stage plays, screenplays—not only amateur-written material but a lot of professionally written stuff as well. For me, bad dialog always stands right out: Wooden characters who speak in complete sentences, never using contractions, never interrupting each other, always spewing bland phrases that reinforce their predictable (and undifferentiated) personalities; characters whose swear words don't even sound right.

I don't claim to be an expert here, but I do believe (based on reading as much awkward, wooden, silly dialog as I've read) there are rules you can follow to keep yourself from writing the Worst Dialog Ever. In that spirit, I present the following eight easy rules for writing better dialog:

People use contractions (don't, I'm, you're, etc.) when they speak. Only prigs and ESL students use fully expanded forms.

People swear in normal conversation, but not as often as you think.

Characters should interrupt each other. Because that's how most conversation is.

Write for low syllable count.

Use many periods, few commas.

Avoid patois unless you're Mark Twain, which you're not.

Let subtext (not the actual spoken words) carry the scene, when possible.

Don't be boring.

I'm tempted to add one more rule (for screenwriters): Don't insert explicit beats in dialog. Years ago, it was common to insert "(beat)" here or there to control tempo. You'll find opinions divided on whether this is still an acceptable thing to do. My advice? Play it smart and refuse to resort to "(beat)" in your script. Control tempo with sentence length, punctuation (including ellipses where necessary), the (very) occasional wryly, action description, and so forth. Can you imagine Hemingway or Fitzgerald inserting "(beat)" in the middle of a conversation? Think how comical and intrusive it would be if novelists inserted explicit beats in dialog to control tempo. You wouldn't do that in a novel, because it would make for a patently awful reading experience. Why should your screenplay read that way?

The enter-a-scene-late/leave-early rule applies to dialog. We don't need to hear characters greet each other, except maybe at the start of a phone conversation. Likewise we don't need to see/hear them say good-bye, unless the whole scene is about parting.

In one scene of my screenplay Greeners, two characters (principals in an investment firm; a father and a son) are about to discuss the day's dismal results. I can think of a million boring, straightforward ways to begin the discussion. (E.g.: The son says: "My God, what a day," or "How was your day?" or something equally banal.) What I ended up with is this: The father, sitting at his desk, collar loosened, disheveled and dejected, pushes a few papers away. As the son (standing nearby) points a finger at the papers, the old man pulls a bottle of Scotch out of his desk and says: "Don't even ask."

"Don't be boring" is probably the most important rule you can follow. Even when characters have to say ordinary things, try to spice it up. When my main character, Dylan, has to talk to a fast-food drive-up menu box, I could have had him say "I'll have a sausage-egg biscuit and a large coffee." Instead, he says: "I'll have a sausage-egg biscuit and a large, black, coffee. Black. With extra coffee." A few seconds later, when the cashier recognizes him and starts motor-mouthing (because she's so excited to see him), he answers her over-animated "How are you??" with "Sixty-forty"—and then she goes on talking. The fact that she doesn't stop to ask what "sixty-forty" means is, in itself, a subtextual clue that she's more interested in hearing herself talk than in what he might have to say. Likewise, the fact that he chose to say "sixty-forty" (instead of "so-so" or "can't complain," or something equally vapid) suggests that maybe he already knows she's not going to pay attention to whatever he has to say. Plus, it gives the audience something to chew on. Is he saying things are sixty percent good and forty percent crappy, or the other way around? What, exactly, does he mean by "sixty-forty"?

When you write dialog, consider what I call orthogonality. Two characters, when talking about their conflicting needs/desires, will tend to speak to their own individual concerns more than to the other person's concerns. (Joe wants to talk about the raise he didn't get at work; Mary wants to talk about Joe Junior's bad day at school.) This is what I call orthogonality. You can use it to build realistic-sounding dialog that accentuates (rather than amalgamates) the characters' differences. You've seen this technique used a million times in TV shows and movies. David storms into Tyler's office and says: "Why the hell didn't you tell me we lost the Frankenhammer account?!" Tyler takes a sip of coffee and says: "I'm fine, thanks for asking. How about yourself?" That's orthogonality.

So, to the foregoing list of 8 items, you can add two more:

9. Don't use explicit beats.

10. Exploit orthogonality.

There's more to good dialog than just following these rules. But if you follow them, chances are you'll at least avoid having someone ask you (after reading something you labored over for hours, days, or weeks) "Do real people talk like this?"

If you'd like to take a look at my WGA-registered screenplay, Greeners, write to me. (Tell me something about yourself.) My hushmail dot com address is kasthomas. TATTOO AND BODY PAINTINGhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-559531826658744094.post-70270487809930119462013-11-07T21:00:00.000-08:002013-12-10T00:28:01.774-08:00A Million Page-Views in Ten MonthsThree weeks ago, while I wasn't paying attention, my blog (this blog) surpassed the one-million-page-views-YTD mark. I can't be 100% sure where the traffic is coming from, since I refuse to click the "Don't track your own page-views" link in Google Analytics. It could still be mostly me hitting Refresh. Or someone with Anonymous perfecting a really, really slow denial-of-service attack. Or maybe my (deceased) mother discovered a time machine 50 years ago, only she didn't tell me about it and she traveled to the future just to pay some dweeb in Milwaukee to unleash a Reddit clickbot that messes with me, then headed back to 1963 to cook dinner. It almost has to be one of those things.

Here are the top posts of the year, so far:

Post	Views

 How I Fell in Love with a Schizophrenic
Jan 1, 2013, 136 comments

73035

How to Write an Opening Sentence
Jan 15, 2013, 19 comments

55708

Are Placebos Really Sugar Pills?
Jan 30, 2013, 40 comments

38440

The Serif Readability Myth
Jan 18, 2013, 32 comments

31109

Information Theory in Three Minutes
May 18, 2013, 2 comments

28134

Now for some really interesting (to me) summary info, looking back at this year's posts:

Five posts accounted for 23% of the year's traffic.

Four out of the top five posts were written in January.

The top two most-trafficked posts had titles that begin with "How," but beyond that there's no thematic pattern whatsoever to the top posts. (Nor could I have predicted the popularity of any of them in advance.)

This year's posts account for only 60% of total YTD traffic; the other 40% of visits went to prior-years' posts. But note well, prior-year posts were never as popular as they are this year. The 60-40 split is new, in other words. It used to be more like 90-10.

My blog got a certain amount of extra traction after April 2013, when I signed on as a regular blogger at BigThink.com (thank you, Dan!), but honestly, the crossover traffic from BigThink has been quite modest.

My traffic really started to pick up in January, when I began blogging almost daily. Prior to that, when I was blogging only a few times a month, 200 to 300 hits a day was pretty typical. It slowly built, over a period of four months or so, to a couple thousand visitors a day, peaking at 3K hits/day in early summer. It's eased off a bit since then. I now count 2200 page-views a day as typical. (But I should stress, that's total site visits, spread across 600+ posts.)

The other thing that's different now is that I have 200,000 followers on Twitter, up from about 140,000 a year ago. The numbers are deceptive, though. It wasn't until this year that I began devoting an hour or more a day to interacting with my Tweeps (rather than just dumping curated links in their laps all the time). But Twitter is another story, worth its own discussion. I'll save that for a future post.

What have I learned? Not a whole lot, actually. The main thing I've learned is that if you want traffic to increase, blog more often. And don't be afraid to write some fairly long posts, if the subject matter warrants it. (My No. 1 most-visited post this year weighed in at 2618 words.)

I hardly touch Facebook, I hate Google Circles, I don't do Instagram, I ignore StumbleUpon. I have a PInterest account that's growing mold somewhere. Oh, and I pay no heed whatsoever to SEO. (I operate on the assumption that good content is its own SEO.)

I never spend money, by the way, promoting anything I do. No Google ad campaigns, no paid slots anywhere.

In short, if someone came to me with a bunch of money and said "Tell me your best secrets for getting more blog traffic," I'd say: Go write the very best content you know how to write, and do it every day if possible; otherwise, several times week. Try to achieve synergy by contributing in more than one space. (I blog here and at BigThink.com, plus I tweet a lot; I post updates at LinkedIn every week even though it feels like hollering into a cardboard box; and I spend an hour a week commenting on other people's stuff around the Web.) Beyond that, there ain't any magic. Just blow a lot of smoke and keep the mirrors shiny.TATTOO AND BODY PAINTINGhttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-559531826658744094.post-26597594412667764292013-11-06T10:20:00.000-08:002013-12-10T00:28:01.835-08:00Meetings Are Bullshit

Jason Fried explains very nicely, in his TED talk, why the modern office is a singularly poor place in which to get work done. Bottom line: It's an atmosphere specifically tailored to facilitate interruptions—what one might call a high-interruptivity environment (by design).

Fried implies, but does not go so far as to elaborate, a theory that productivity—like sleep—occurs in sequential stages. The stages of sleep proceed one to the other, each one dependent on the previous one's successful conclusion. When sleep is interrupted, you have to start over and proceed through the various stages before you can arrive at REM sleep. For this reason, eight one-hour naps interspersed with five minutes of wakefulness do not add up to a full night's sleep. Similarly, a succession of 15- and 20-minute periods of work (in an office environment where you've constantly interrupted by texts, phone calls, e-mails, IM, meetings, coworkers coming in to see you, bosses checking on you, and so forth) seldom adds up to a day's work. To get serious work done requires long periods of no interruptions. This is why so many people say that their favorite place to get serious work done is the back porch, the basement, the attic, the shower, the library, Starbucks, etc., or (if it's indeed the office) the office after everyone leaves to go home, or before everyone arrives in the morning. No one counts as their most productive environment the office during working hours!

Fried is rightfully critical of meetings as the number one source of lost productivity in a modern office setting. Through technologies like Webex and Go-to-Meeting, we're able to introduce productivity losses even to people working from home.

If I were to criticize Fried's presentation, I would only say that he has not gone far enough in his views, particularly his condemnation of meetings. Toward the end of his talk, he suggests, as an exercise, that any manager who has a meeting planned for Monday simply cancel (and not reschedule) the meeting and see what happens. Does the world come to an end? Do sales drop? Do people stop getting work done? Or, to the contrary, does the cancellation of a one-hour meeting involving ten people result in ten additional person-hours of productivity, reclaimed for free?

I wish Fried would have taken his own logic to the ultimate conclusion, which is that all meetings should simply be outlawed. Which they certainly should be, in my opinion.

I have worked for small, medium, and large-size companies, mostly in software development, both as an individual contributor and as a manager. In my seven years at Novell (two as a line employee, five as a manager), I estimate I attended three meetings a week, or about 1000 meetings total. At Adobe, I attended a weekly status meeting (which was often cancelled, to no ill effect whatever) plus one or two division-level all-hands meetings per quarter, and one to two company-level all-hands meetings per quarter. I can say without reservation that all meetings I attended at Novell and Adobe, except for one-on-one meetings, were utterly without effect aside from the undeniable effect of resetting everyone's productivity to zero on the occasion of the meeting.

You might ask yourself, if you're the habit of setting up meetings, what it says about the fragility of your company and/or the ineffectuality of your organization (or your management style) if the success of the enterprise is somehow compromised by not holding that weekly status meeting or that monthly planning meeting or that quarterly all-hands meeting that you think (stupidly) is so necessary to inspiring team spirit and getting everyone "on the same page." In all my time at big companies (and smaller ones too) I can't remember a single meeting being indispensible, or in fact doing anything except distract me from getting real work done. Invariably, when I missed a meeting, I found out later that I either missed nothing substantive whatsoever, or I could easily (and in a few minutes' time) catch up on whatever I'd missed simply by reading a transcript, a key memo, or a followup note somewhere on the intranet.

Are there exceptions? Sure. I count as meaningful one-on-one meetings with a clear agenda, and scrum-style meetings in which participants stand the whole time (for ten minutes or so). The rest, you can e-mail me. I have no tolerance for larger meetings (especially those at which "minutes" are taken). Mail me the freakin' minutes. I'll decide if they're useful. On my schedule.

Meetings are a classic example of a non-optional push technology that should be replaced by an opt-in/pull technology. Post what I need to know somewhere. I'll look at it when it's time for me to look at it. When it's time for me to be nonproductive.TATTOO AND BODY PAINTINGhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-559531826658744094.post-72574423016632211152013-11-03T21:00:00.000-08:002013-12-10T00:28:01.893-08:00Fixing a Mediocre MovieIf ever it were possible (which it seldom is) for sublime acting to elevate an otherwise unremarkable film to the status of a minor classic, it surely would have happened in the case of The Last Station, the well-intentioned 2009 Tolstoy biopic that brought Oscar and Golden Globe nominations (but no wins) to Christopher Plummer and Helen Mirren for their commanding portrayals of Leo and Sofya Tolstoy. The performances were genuinely excellent. Alas, the movie was not. It's fair to ask why not, because on the surface, you'd think any movie about the life of the greatest international celebrity of the 19th century (which Tolstoy surely was) couldn't fail to be a compelling tale. But sadly, like Tolstoy's own final journey by rail, The Last Station falls far short of its ultimate destination, leaving the passenger (the moviegoer) stranded and wanting for a place to hang his or her shapka, so to speak.

The ingredients are there: strong characters, conflict, intrigue, deception, drama. Leo Tolstoy, at age 81, was trying desperately to simplify his increasingly complex professional and family life. He had long since signed over his worldly possessions (including the family estate, Yasnaya Polyana) to the care of his wife. But he also secretly conspired, with the aid of his devoted disciple, Vladimir Grigoryevich Chertkov, to concoct a secret will that would have his literary properties go to the public domain. Of course, Sofya was no fool and saw through her husband's multiple attempts to write her out of the literary inheritance. The Last Station is the story of Sonya's descent into near-madness (and Leo's final, abortive attempt to escape the madness) as Chertkov wrests control of the Tolstoy literary legacy from Sonya. Leo boards a train, at the end, seeking to put physical distance (as much of it as possible) between himself and his wife. By the time he reaches Astapovo, the last station on the rail line, he is deathly ill with pneumonia. His wife arrives at Astapovo just in time to see him die.

The problem with The Last Station, as a movie, is that writer-director Michael Hoffman (working from Jay Parini's novel) chose to give us an extremely narrow snapshot of an enormous subject, more or less like trying to capture the Grand Canyon with a 1952 Brownie camera. The movie not only doesn't try to give us a significant slice of Tolstoy's life, it's actually happy to focus in on just a few weeks (the final weeks) of the great man's story. What's worse, the story is told through the eyes of a rather insignificant character, Tolstoy's replacement secretary (replacing N. N. Gusev, who was for a short time imprisoned), the young Valentin Bulgakov. Along the way, we're made to suffer through Bulgakov's own irrelevant romance with a young woman who's in no way related to Tolstoy (nor any other real-world character).

The movie thus fails on several levels. It fails, first, in not giving us a significant slice of Tolstoy's life. It merely presents the 81-year-old master to us as a world celebrity, ready-made, and expects us to bring significant knowledge of Tolstoy's backstory with us. The movie also distracts us from the main story by (as I said) forcing us to watch an utterly forgettable romantic side-plot that never intersects the main plot. But the movie also fails to show off the true main character of any movie (of whatever scope) about any great Russian writer: namely, Mother Russia herself.

It may be unfair to compare a movie of The Last Station's modest aspirations (and equally modest budget: $17 million) with David Lean's unforgettable cinematic rendition of Boris Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago (which cost $11 million in 1965 dollars), but the fact is, no one who has seen Doctor Zhivago will fail, consciously or unconsciously, to make the comparison in his or her mind between the Lean movie and any subsequent movie involving an iconic Russian figure. The striking thing (one of many) about Doctor Zhivago is that at no time in the movie can the viewer be unaware of the looming presence of that "other main character," bigger than life, Russia herself. Unfortunately, and crucially, we lose that essential character in The Last Station, and without it, the story of Tolstoy's final weeks seems like little more than thin domestic farce.

It's easy to spew out criticism. How to fix it? What could the writer-director have done to rescue The Last Station from the clutches of mediocrity (aside from rewriting it as a stage play)? In particular, how could it have been improved without expanding the story into a Zhivago-like epic spanning the whole of Tolstoy's life?

I think first of all it's necessary (and sufficient, for this limited-budget film) to tell the story of Tolstoy's last ten years, rather than his final year. By dispensing with the trivial Bulgakov character (and his meaningless romance) we save many feet of film that could be better put to use telling the story through the eyes of Tolstoy's personal physician, Dushan Makovitsky, a decidedly pivotal figure in the drama.

The (rewritten) story opens 24 February 1901, at a train station in St. Petersburg, where nameless nobodies come and go, among them a young nobody who, while waiting for his train, carefully (which is to say, first looking to see that no one is watching him) slides a book out of his coat and begins to read it. The book: a copy of Tolstoy's banned The Kingdom of God Is Within You.

A nearby church bell tolls. We cut to the interior of the Cathedral of Our Lady (St. Petersburg) where a grave-looking Metropolitan Anthony ascends the pulpit to read the document officially excommunicating Count Lev Nickolayevich Tolstoy from the Orthodox Church.

Cut to a villa at Gaspra, on the Black Sea. It's September 1901. At the insistence of his physician, Tolstoy has come to Crimea to recuperate from malaria. He's joined at the seaside villa not only by his family but by Anton Chekhov and Maxim Gorky. (All of this is true, by the way.)

Chekhov, shaking his head, looks up from his newspaper. "It's been seven months, Lev Nickolayevich, and they're still writing about the excommunication!"

At the time of his death in 1910, Tolstoy was arguably the
best-known celebrity in the world.

At this point, there is ample room to discuss the reasons for the excommunication. Tolstoy has been writing books and tracts (most famously, The Kingdom of God Is Within You) blasting the church's version of Christianity, putting forth his own no-nonsense, no-miracles, no-hocus-pocus version of the Gospels, emphasizing the Sermon on the Mount and its call for turning the other cheek and repudiating violence. Tolstoy has turned Jesus's teachings against the church, by pointing out that no one who advocates violence (even in a just cause) is adhering to Jesus's teachings.

Tolstoy's own fundamentalism has not only gotten him in hot water with the Church (and the Tsar), it has spawned a Christian anarchism movement that has, by 1901, circled the globe. In Russia, believers in Tolstoy's version of Christianity are refusing military service in significant numbers. In England and elsewhere, acolytes have formed "Tolstoyan colonies." One of Tolstoy's most ardent followers, at home, is (of course) Vladimir Chertkov, who will remain a lifelong disciple, creating the first English-language editions of Tolstoy's works and publishing inexpensive editions of his books both in England and in Russia (resulting in ten years of exile for Chertkov).

Tolstoy's religious fervor, seen by his wife as incomprehensible, is ultimately what powers the bond with Chertkov, the rift with Sofya, and Tolstoy's own mad quest to shed worldly belongings before he dies. By making this aspect of Tolstoy's life clear, The Last Station (properly remade) could give life to the motivations of its characters and make clear why so many Russians considered Tolstoy a living saint.

As part of his creed, Tolstoy advocated celibacy, vegetarianism, and repudiation of worldly goods. He strongly agreed with Proudhon that "property is theft." Once this fact is known, it becomes possible, in a remake of The Last Station, to put Tolstoy's philosophy in historical context. Thus it becomes relevant to include in such a movie a scene (for example) of the 150,000 people who marched on the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg in January 1905. These were not card-carrying Bolsheviks but ordinary people, many of whom had been inspired by Tolstoy's (not just Marx's) philosophy.

I can think of many powerful scenes that would make sense in a film that attempts to capture Tolstoy's final decade rather than his final six months of life. By slavishly adhering to Parini's novel, screenwriter-director Hoffman reinquished any opportunity he might have had to do the Tolstoy story justice in The Last Station. We end up with melodrama instead of drama, narrow provinciality instead of sweeping grandeur, and poor Mother Russia herself reduced to a forgotten stepsister, when in fact the stage—like the characters—could not, in this case, have possibly been any bigger.TATTOO AND BODY PAINTINGhttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-559531826658744094.post-70086445921915700812013-11-03T06:41:00.000-08:002013-12-10T00:28:01.952-08:00Internet Quotations

TATTOO AND BODY PAINTINGhttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-559531826658744094.post-76500287059312210932013-10-24T12:07:00.000-07:002013-12-10T00:28:02.010-08:00No Country for Timid MenA screenplay is no place to be timid, tentative, or reserved.

I've read eight spec scripts in the past few days, by unknown writers. Most of the scripts were garbage, two were salvageable (in theory, at least). One of the salvageables was a romantic comedy. The problem with the comedy was that it was good, but not great. I liked it but didn't love it.

Why didn't I love it? First, the scene descriptions were novelistic instead of telegraphic. That's easy to fix. Secondly, the dialog in each scene began "too early," with throwaway lines (the characters greeting each other); too much setup. Again, not hard to fix.

Not so easy to fix is the fact that the humor just wasn't over-the-top. The author fell in love with her characters and thought everything they did was inherently adorable and/or hilarious.

I suggested some touch-ups here and there, but frankly it's the author's job to make it great. All I could do is point out some really obvious areas of potential that were glossed over.

The hero of one script, an adorable nerd (think Forty-Year-Old Virgin), has managed to convince a beautiful woman to accompany him to Hawaii. One scene has him sulking in the bar, alone. The bartender, a burly Hawaiian, finds the hero sulking, sipping at a drink, listening to a ukulele player. He asks our hero something like: "You look like you could use a friend. Want to talk about it?" The hero says "Nah, I'm just going to listen." The bartender: "Talk to me, bro. I have a B.A. in psychology." Mr. Sad Sack says no.

Well, if this is a comedy, I don't like sad bar scenes. My rewrite of this encounter has the bartender saying: "Talk to me, bro. I have a Ph.D. in psychology." Our hero perks up. "What are you doing working here?" Bartender: "Dude. This is where the crazy people are."

Not a knee-slapper, but enough to keep the interest going. It has the ring of truth. People with doctorates sometimes do end up tending bar, in this great economy of ours. And yeah, bars are where the crazies often hang out. In the next scene, when the author has the hero wanting to comfort a young lady nearby who's crying in her beer, the bartender (in the original version of the script) warns our hero off: "Don't do it, man. She a crazy one." The line had zero impact before I gave the man a Ph.D.

At one point, the hero admits to his traveling companion (the beauty-girl) that he was engaged once. He explains that it didn't work out. Boring scene. Not at all in keeping with the character's virginity (or apparent virginity, up to that point). I suggested changing it to him saying: "Actually, I was engaged once. To the Little Mermaid." His partner says: "A cartoon character?" He says: "But it was doomed. She had this, you know, fishy smell."

Again, not exactly a knee-slapper, but the point is, this is a comedy with far too many boring backstory scenes. Why not try to make the boring parts a little more interesting? It's not an option, it's a requirement.

Turns out the heroine was also engaged (and still is) to a Fabio-like muscle dude with a cleft chin. I suggested a line or two of our hero warning her that if she marries Fabio, she's going to wake up looking at a butt-chin about 17,000 times in her life. "And if you smell inside there? There's chin smegma. No, it's true. Chinegma. Chin cheese." Etc.

This comedy's premise is that the main character (the 40-year-old nerd/virgin) has a brain tumor, and he's trying to scratch off items on his decidedly eccentric "bucket list." What the author didn't do is take advantage of the obvious liberty this guy has to do whatever he wants and say whatever he wants to whomever he wants. If he's dying, he's free to go nuts. Right? Instead, he does the most tepid, boring stuff.

It takes courage to write comedy. I told the author, the first thing you have to do is go through the whole script and exaggerate everything you possibly can. When the tattoo artist tells our guy to bring a stick to bite on, that's not good enough. The tattoo artist should tell him to bring a broom handle to bite on, or a baseball bat, or whatever. Think big, think outlandish, magnify things, make them colorful (bigger than life, as we say). We're at the movies. Let's see something fun.

Another comedy script I read suffered from the same problem of too-tameness. Everything was tame when it should have been out-of-control, outlandish. The hero, at one point, robs a bank. His stick-up line: "I know this is going to be a drag for some of you, but this is a stickup."

Huh?

In my mind, I had the guy leaping onto a counter or table, firing a gun in the air, and saying (in Roddy Piper fashion) "Listen up assholes! I'm here to floss my teeth, and kick ass. And I'm all, out, of dental floss!"

Women scream. A man tries to make a phone call.

The hero points his gun at the man's crotch. "I wouldn't try it, Superman, unless you want to be a GODDAM SOPRANO!"

When you're writing for the big screen, you have to be visual (not just talk-talk-talk, which is another common problem with spec scripts) and you have to think big/outlandish. Don't be timid. Leave timidity behind. Write like you mean it. Slay the audience, or die trying.

If you're a screenwriter, novelist, actor, director, agent, or industry person and you'd like to get a sneak peek at my script, "Greeners," write to me (and include your Twitter handle if you have one). My hushmail dot com address is kasthomas. All inquiries kept confidential.TATTOO AND BODY PAINTINGhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-559531826658744094.post-86010797083100662092013-10-22T21:48:00.000-07:002013-12-10T00:28:02.068-08:00What Makes a Script Work?Yesterday I read, and wrote coverage for, four spec scripts by unknown writers. I don't want to go into too much detail about the specifics, but let's just say this: Doing coverage is hard. It's hard under good circumstances. But when the scripts are stinky (as most are) it's actually a punishing experience all the way around.

One script I read was a lighthearted comedy set in Manhattan. The premise was just plain silly. A privately owned publishing house that churns out romance novels (written by people sitting at cubicles!) struggles to remain solvent. A young couple working there tries to save the ailing firm. Hijinks ensue.

Another script involved a card game with a demon-in-disguise. The hero finds a way to chase the demon into the demon's alternate reality, where he must master the rules of the Other World before doing battle with the demon in order to save a sick child whose soul the demon has claimed.

A third script was a substance-abuse comedy a la Cheech and Chong.

All three of these were terrible in various ways.

The least-sucky of the three, the comedy involving the Manhattan "paperback factory," had wooden characters, zero conflict, almost no plot, and for a so-called comedy it had vanishingly few laughs.

The demon fantasy was mercifully short (88 pages); that's the best thing I can say about it.

 The Cheech and Chong epic was dismal, with super-verbose scene descriptions, long speeches, and frequent references to specific song lyrics by specific artists (a no-no).

All three suction-enabled scripts had a few things in common. First, the characters were bland (the opposite of unforgettable) and sounded alike. The publishing-world comedy had no ethnic characters at all (in New York City??) and the characters sounded as if they came out of the same womb and attended the same prep schools. Secondly, the scripts relied far too much on dialog to tell the story. Often, the dialog was horribly stilted. ("My sister, you are a nincompoop" is funny, but for the wrong reasons. The author wasn't trying to be funny.) Most of all, though, the dialog was just incessant, often with "(beat)" inserted to control the rhythm.

The bad scripts had cardboard characters who simply existed, with no backstories, no texture, no complexity, no personality, and minimal (if any) character arc. They were the same lifeless characters at the end of the tale that they were at the beginning.

What you quickly realize when you start reading scripts is that all of the elements of a story play off each other: colorful characters say and do interesting things that both generate conflict and make their response(s) to conflicts all the more interesting. Strange synergies happen. When all the elements are working, they reinforce each other in remarkable ways. Conversely, when you start with flat characters and low stakes, nothing interesting can happen. It's strange how, in a good script, everything tends to work, whereas in a bad script nothing tends to work.

The fourth script I read was a winner. It was a psychological noir thriller in which a 25-year-old cab driver with a 6-year-old sister goes in search of the sociopathic father who ruined their lives. The characters were vivid, the dialog was some of the best I've ever read, the scene construction was crisp, and basically you could tell in the first five pages you were in the hands of an expert. (So yeah, it's true what they say. Ten pages is plenty of time in which to judge the expertise of the writer.)

Now here's the interesting thing. The author of the A+ script made a few boo-boos. He didn't mention until page seven what part of the world the story takes place in (Detroit). On page one, he had a line of dialog that said "Alright, lets go then." I don't know how you feel, but as a professional writer I've always hated the non-word "alright." There's "all right," or there's "okay," but there is (in English) no "alright." Also, "let us" contracts to "let's," not "lets."

The writer used "alright" about 30 times in the script. He also used the f-word way, way, way too much, greatly diminishing its impact. And at the most critical point in the action, he lapsed into passive voice!

And yet, I absolutely loved the script. The level of craft was so undeniably high, the dialog so crisp and believable, the scenes so superbly crafted, the timing and pacing so deft, the plot's twists so unpredictable, the characters so memorable, the ending so poignant, I couldn't help but throw my hands up at the end and go "Yesss!!!"

Bottom line, you can commit a certain number of sins and still get a rave review. But your script better sing. It better do the important stuff so incredibly well that the reviewer is ashamed to give you anything but an A+ grade. That's what happened with the knockout script I read. It kicked major ass. Flaws and all.

If you're a screenwriter, novelist, actor, director, agent, or industry person and you'd like to get a sneak peek at my script, "Greeners," write to me (and include your Twitter handle if you have one). My hushmail dot com address is kasthomas. All inquiries kept confidential.

TATTOO AND BODY PAINTINGhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-559531826658744094.post-39418901907095629552013-10-20T16:02:00.000-07:002013-12-10T00:28:02.128-08:00When Characters All Sound the SameThe screenwriting books all say that one of the most common complaints around scripts (of all kinds) is that the characters sound the same, instead of each character having a distinct, unique voice.

But how can you establish distinct "voices" in a script's characters in the first 10 pages? (That's how long you've got, basically.)

It helps, obviously, to have a vivid image, in your mind, of a real-life person (such as a certain actor who fits the part) for each character. As you write, imagine what kind of language that person would use.

The other more-or-less standard bit of advice you encounter a lot in books and articles on screenwriting: Go through and edit all of one character's dialog, whether it's the first 10 pages or the whole script, without looking at any other character's dialog. Then do that for the next character. And so on. This way, you have some hope of achieving consistency in dialect and clean separation of diction patterns from one character to the next.

But how can you achieve characterwise speech differentiation quickly, without resorting to patois or other gimmicks?

I'll tell you a trick I was able to use in the script I just finished. The trick is pretty simple: Have one character mock the other's diction. In my script, Greeners, the hero is a 29-year-old American grad student (think Mickey Rourke 1983). His future partner is a 23-year-old Hindustani woman from New Delhi, a post-doctoral fellow in his department. By page 7, she owes him, bigtime, for putting out a car fire. A few pages later they meet again, and she realizes she never properly thanked him. She tells him so. Then asks: "How shall I repay you?"

No American talks like that. No one says "shall I" in conversation. He says (mocking): "How shall you... 'repay me'? Come on, I didn't do anything."

It's a subtle reinforcement of the fact that they're from two different cultures. She learned British English as a second language. He's James Dean's lost brother. (When he suggests she "thank him" by letting him take her out to dinner, she doesn't nod. She does a little figure-eight head-wobble, Indian for okay/perhaps/why not.)

She's prim, well educated, polite to a fault, and therefore uses proper fully expanded English. Instead of "can't" she tends to say "cannot," for example. He can say "wouldn't've" (as in, "I wouldn't've done that..."); she has to say "would not have."

A few pages of this, and it's pretty clear who's the homie and who's here on a visa.

Another tip: People's true speech patterns always surface in a crisis. One person might shout "Bleedin' Christ!" whereas the next person might say "Oh dear Lord no," etc. So put a crisis on page 5 and differentiate the characters right then and there.

You were planning to do that anyway, though. Right?

If you'd like to see my (WGA-registered) screenplay, drop me a line. My hushmail dot com address is kasthomas. Inquiries held in strictest confidence.
TATTOO AND BODY PAINTINGhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-559531826658744094.post-18679335671351293622013-10-18T21:00:00.000-07:002013-12-10T00:28:02.186-08:00Lessons from the ScriptThe screenplay draft is complete. It ended up at 114 pages rather than 112. Boo hoo.

Here's some of what I've learned so far.

The books all say that screenwriting is hard. And it is. IMHO, it's harder than poetry. Makes writing a novel seem like a stroll on the beach.

Screenwriting is a lot like a stroll on the beach—Omaha Beach.

In his book On Writing (a fine book, BTW), Stephen King talks about how he develops stories. Basically, he creates interesting characters, puts them in a dramatic situation, and lets them figure it out. There is no conscious attempt to plot or create subplots; the characters do what they must, inevitably (given their proclivities and their situation) do. King merely transcribes. He gets all the way through a novel this way; following the headlights all the way to the destination, so to speak.

It works for King because he's a master at what he does, and the form (the novel) allows it.

Screenwriting is so constraint-intensive, there is precious little room (although there is some) for organic story growth. You almost have to come at it with a complete structure in mind. Screenwriter Matt Bird has a story structure checklist (encompassing character development and all sorts of other things) that's 100+ items long. You're not going to hit even a third of the points in that list using an unprepared "structure it as you go" approach. If you can, well, congratulations; maybe you're channeling Robert Towne; in which case please accept my unworthy bow as I exit stage-left.

Alien would work well as a silent movie. The dialog augments the story.

You'll run out of room. Guaranteed. Budget 32 pages for Act I and you'll go sailing through that mark like a drunk through a stop sign. Set an absolute page limit of 110 and you'll be at 120 before you know it.

Therefore the best advice I can give you is: Enlarge all margins and tab limits at the start, just a smidge, so you'll get fewer words per page. You'll gladly kill any number of grandmothers later to widen them out again.

Another tip that may keep you from busting your page count: One day when you're thoroughly blocked, write the ending. Write the final two scenes (more, if you can) of the script, complete. Behold: Your "active writing area" is now bookended by the already-written beginning and the already-in-place ending. You have less surface area in which to work, and the paint dries faster, forcing you to up the pace. Which you were wanting to do anyway, right?

Thirty pages seems like a lot in the beginning. But when you've got just thirty pages left to write, it's never enough.

Let actions and situations do the talking whenever possible. Let characters speak only if and when they must, and even then, let subtext, not the actual words, tell the story.

Never forget one thing. Watching a movie is an act of voyeurism. Hence, all dialog is overheard. Hence, no conversation needs to begin at the beginning. Think of the times you've overheard a conversation (whether at a bar, a social function, standing in line, or whatever) in real life. Did you ever hear the actual start of the conversation? Chances are you came along in the middle. Yet within a few seconds, you figured out the essentials of the conversation (who, what, where, when, why) from context. That's how all movie dialog works. The film viewer is an eavesdropper, not a court stenographer.

Take a scene, any scene. Cut the first line of dialog. Does the scene still work? Yes? Then why did you ever think you needed that line of dialog?

More often than not, dialog is about subtext, backstory, misdirection, and/or foreshadowing, not just what's going on at the moment. We can see what's going on at the moment.

Dialog, properly done, wears a hairpiece. It's never bald.

It helps to know something about stage magic and its crazy stepsister, comedy. Both are all about misdirection.

Would your script still make for a good moviegoing experience with the sound off? Alien would play damn well as a silent movie. My Dinner with Andre would not. Look at your script with dialog turned off (in your head, at least). Which did you write? Alien, or My Dinner with Andre?

I was fortunate, with the script I just wrote, to have a multinational story, with lots of non-English-speaking characters (but zero subtitles, thanks). Try it sometime. Write a scene that involves foreign nationals, speaking their native tongues, using no subtitles, with the idea that the scene has to be understandable to anyone, of any language. See how far you can take it. Can you still make the scene work? Why or why not?

There's more to tell. Suffice it to say, the screenplay-writing process has taught me a lot. And I thought I already knew a thing or two. I was right, as it turns out. I knew a thing. Maybe two at the most.

If you'd like to see my (WGA-registered) screenplay, drop me a line. My hushmail dot com address is kasthomas. Inquiries held in strictest confidence. Please mention your Twitter handle (if applicable).TATTOO AND BODY PAINTINGhttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-559531826658744094.post-59141593903578067232013-10-16T21:00:00.000-07:002013-12-10T00:28:02.247-08:00112 Pages of "What If?"I haven't blogged a heck of a lot over the past month or so, because I'm in the middle of a Quixotic quest to finish a screenplay. It's been heck of a journey; and the journey is (in many ways) just beginning.

I can't say a lot about the project just yet (although I'll definitely be saying more in future posts, so watch this space). Here's what I can say.

First, writing a screenlay is hard. It's harder than a novel. By quite a bit, I'm afraid.

Secondly, it's difficult writing something with the knowledge that maybe only a handful of people will ever read it. I keep telling myself: It's good exercise. Even if it goes nowhere, it leaves me with all the scaffolding for a novel: well-defined characters with character arcs, a story, backstories, plot points, subplots, reversals, key dialog, key visuals.

Thirdly, having said all this, I wouldn't waste my own (nor anybody else's) time on a project I didn't think was truly epic, relevant, commercial, original, and flat-out un-putdownable. The project is based on an original idea I had about two years ago. It's been germinating and blossoming ever since.

It's a high-concept story involving world hunger, with a Philip K. Dick slant. The concept proceeds from the idea: What if you (or someone you knew) stumbled onto a tool, technique, technology, or idea that really, truly could make a dent in world hunger? What then?

"What then" is 112 pages of screenplay.

My first stab at this was a manuscript for a young adult novel that I got 100 pages into (a year ago) before making the unforgivable mistake of sending off a few queries to agents, on a lark. To my shock and horror, I got an immediate request for a full read. And of course, there I sat with 25,000 words written and 45,000 unwritten. I never got back to the agent.

Instead, I put the project away for a while and thought about it some more. And I realized that the story would play out a lot better if the hero was significantly older. Rather than have the hero be a 17-year-old Indian-American whiz kid, I decided it would be better to make him a 29-year-old white-upper-middle-class American grad student with a female Hindustani lab partner (a post-doc) who, as his intellectual equal (and cultural superior, in many ways), can keep our hero honest, point up his faults, challenge him, goad him, infuriate him, and eventually (of course) fall in love with him—when he finally slays the (figurative) dragon.

But wait, you're saying, 29 is awfully old for a grad student, isn't it? Actually, I've met the type before. They get a master's degree right off the bat, but when it comes time to finish the Ph.D., the lab work just never seems to add up to a thesis. Nature takes its time handing out dissertation-worthy scientific discoveries. You can't force a discovery. Laboratory science is an art. Luck is involved. In my grad student days at U.C. Davis, I knew several "older" students who had labored valiantly for six years (seven being the max allowed by many universities) to achieve a coherent set of results for a thesis, without ever actually getting there. If you're one of these people, it can be frustrating to watch a younger grad student move into the lab, work on something for a year, stumble onto a great scientific result, and have a Ph.D. in 24 months. The two-year science Ph.D. is a very real phenomenon. So is the seven-year Ph.D., unfortunately.

My "what if" story follows the pair of young scientists on a journey that takes them from New Haven, Conneticut to Madhya Pradesh, India. It's epic in scale, global in relevance (and multi-ethnic in cast), has all the elements of a good suspense drama, and forces the viewer (or reader) to confront hard questions. What if X? What if Y? What if Z? What if all three?

I'll be able to reveal more specifics soon. I need to nail Act III first. And that could take a while. But I'm working on a self-imposed deadline. In two weeks, the screenplay will be done—or I'll stop eating until it is done. Hopefully it won't come to that.

On the theory that it is never too early to attach talent, I invite any actors or film people who might be interested in seeing the WGA-registered script when it's available (which is soon—days, not months) to drop me an e-mail. My hushmail dot com address is kasthomas. Inquiries will be kept in confidence. TATTOO AND BODY PAINTINGhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-559531826658744094.post-84892294992632597922013-10-13T21:00:00.000-07:002013-12-10T00:28:02.303-08:00Online Vocabulary by GenderDo men and women use language differently in the real world? It may seem obvious, but yeah, they do, at least on Facebook. A recent paper in PLoS sheds light on the issue. I thought the following graphic was interesting. (Click it to get a bigger version.) The data come from 75,000 users of Facebook.

Language usage by women is depicted above, with male vocabulary below. The size of the word indicates the strength of the correlation whereas color indicates relative frequency of usage. Underscores connect words of multiword phrases. Words and phrases are in the center; topics, represented as the 15 most prevalent words, surround.

The paper from which this diagram comes, "Personality, Gender, and Age in the Language of Social Media: The Open-Vocabulary Approach," by Schwartz et al. (Univ. of Pennsylvania and Univ. of Cambridge), contains a good many additional great nuggets of information, including a great set of graphs showing (among other things) how hate words correlate with age. The unsurprising result: Hate words go down as age goes up. Also interesting: Older people talk more about the future. The older you are, the more future-oriented you become. This makes sense. When you're young, you don't think about the future quite as much. Why should you, when you're going to live forever?TATTOO AND BODY PAINTINGhttp://email@example.com