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#10 - They're All Plotting Against You
File Under: What's My Motivation?
Stretched to the heights of tension by the stirring strains of:
Garbage – The World Is Not Enough
Dikla Douri – Longing
Dikla Douri – Obsession
The Pietasters – Out All Night
Haifa Wehbe - Mesh Adra Astana
Haifa Wehbe - Naughty
Late column, sorry. Family stuff knocked my week out.
It was a fine Memorial Day weekend, in which I completed the albatross humor anthology DOSE and still had a couple days for comedy and barbecues. Now that this supposedly quick and dirty little disposable pop humor project is done after…cripes, 19 months? I’m wondering what’s going to steal my days.
Fortunately, I have a western script (THE MISSION) and an artist (Leonardo Pietro) who draws faster than I can write. The hump of it is, I know something’s missing. Some dramatic element is brought up but left unresolved. The spell is incomplete.
So it’s time for revisions. And now I’m thinking about drama and action again. I’m sitting in a bar on Bowery, provoking fate by following beer with whiskey with cocktails, waiting for my cousin to not show up, and turning over what’s wrong with Act I in my head. I lay out what needs to be shown pretty well, and really, Act I is usually a wind up, you don’t have to knock out a massive crisis, and probably shouldn’t unless you have something even better to top it down the line. But still…something is not right. Walk with me while I try to resolve what’s bugging me.
THE MISSION is taking much longer to rewrite than I had considered. I'm beefing up all the talky talk with some visuals, and had a good little philosophical exploration through notes on the J home yesterday about Drama, Action, Tension, Conflict, etc. I know they teach this stuff in school, but only one, maybe two writing classes I've ever taken taught you things you didn't already know if you were writing, and it's still a lesson you have to experience to really learn. It's the difference between knowing the aphorism and the first time you experience it. When you actually meet a proverbial who cries metaphorical wolf, and you try to express what happened, only to realize Aesop already characterized it perfectly millennia back.
So with that said, you’re either going to nod knowingly or just take this info in stride the day you’re writing and the mechanics make themselves manifest in your crackling frontal lobe. This is all new stuff to me, and I want to get it down while I still get it.
Character lives in the choices one makes, they say. That’s why “action” has a much broader field than simply visually interesting developments. Action is any development that alters the gamble to be made. The payoff may rise or fall, the risk may increase or ease, but something has to influence the choice to be made. The really best writers make that happen naturally without making it seem to be an imported change.
Drama is basically the threat of loss, the opportunity of gain or some combination thereof, wrapped up in a pretty exciting package. Drama at its best is a thought experiment that stumps its audience with “Holy cow! What would YOU do?”
Conveniently, the easiest way out also gives the best results, which is to disown the story going on in your head. Play armchair quarterback (or armchair editor), and just be your own audience, then react to the story someone else in your head presents. It’s a given that if you stop trying to write, forget to fret about infusing everything with literary value, and just play with the mercury in your head, you’ll end up with a satisfying story and the meaning and symbolism will end up there anyway. Writer’s block is a symptom of taking oneself too seriously. Just remember history and culture are going to steamroll even Shakespeare eventually, and nothing you write can have any real meaning or permanence. See? You’ve shaken off all that burdensome self-concern with dire existentialism!
Now you’re free to dissect your own work as an audience member and conflude, “It was alright, but it would have been so cool if Hero-23 had punched out his own guts to save Distressia!”
Anyway, you’re going to end up taking it seriously regardless, so just make sure it’s the audience part of you doing it, while the mad demiurge writer with the attentionspan of a hummingbird is spinning glorious new scenarios.
The traditional advice is “kill your darlings,” i.e. be prepared to destroy, ditch or distort every element you affectionately clutch, or the ship will sink from too much ballast. I’d say beyond that, “kill yourself.” Shuck that identity, recognize your tricks, top them, shuck them, and try to write characters who are different from you. Try to understand what motivates the actions of humanity in all its wonderful, stupid, conniving, noble, ironic glory. If you can’t, at least get their actions down, and reasoning will come later. If you know what they would and wouldn’t do, eventually you’ll understand it.
Because if you know your character’s capabilities and limits, you know what they can do that others can’t, and you know exactly where to test them, trying to push them into doing something they normally wouldn’t, for better or for worse. You can readily cobble up scenarios that challenge their specific attributes.
Hunh. I think I only just now became conscious of that. Quick study, slow learner.
Action is the actual toss of the dice, spin of the roulette wheel, etc. It doesn't have to be both (I hate the too-often present artificiality of "must risk loss as well as gain" or vice versa), though it's good if it is. Just don't do yoga to make it happen. Or even...don't play false. Treat a story like a friend you trust. No need to make job interview faces and convince it of things you both know are only half-credible.
The best stories, across the board, the most interesting, engaging, and often intellectual, provoke the reader to gasp “NOW what will the hero do?”
As for the story that’s stumping me, here’s what works. I’ve got a prologue that lays out who my protagonist is (a frustrated young cop) and the world he lives in (an empire created by Carthage if Hannibal had won the second Punic war). It shows his love of order, but his problem with authority he feels isn’t earned. It shows the society he lives in, and how it tugs him between work, family, and love.
He’s young, proud and angry, so it’s telling that when he gets sent to the toe-end of nowhere, he affects a very charming, approachable persona. This is in part because he’s no longer champing at the bit of inferior superiors, and partly because he wants to do a good job.
Realization #1: This is also who he wants to be.
Realization #2: He won’t be able to keep it up forever. Everybody falls. The id is as inevitable as the superego is unattainable. Pride or lust, his innate sins, will probably claim him.
Hmmm, sins. I should consider what the vices of each character are, as well as the aspirations.
Promptly on arriving in town, he shows respect and friendship to the aboriginal population, and ends up applying a spot of much-needed diplomacy to a sore spot that explodes thanks to outside influence. We see there’s more tension than simple segregation between the settlers and the natives, but it probably needs more time from the tribe’s point of view to show they’re being minimized and ignored.
Realization #3: Segregation never works, apart from being implicitly unequal. It makes a taboo of the disadvantaged side, which in turn makes them attractive to the franchised party. Following its subjugation, a race is usually sentimentalized into loving subjects, seen as simple and happy, their wild nature rendering them more easily content than the big-thinking conquerors. That “wild” nature would probably make them quite the fetish to many of their supposed superiors. Plus the fair-minded types who take them as equals. Play that all up more.
So he dispatches of a bully, ends up at dinner with the town leaders, gets warned away from the priest’s daughter, and escorts the madam home. That’s where things slow down. It’s just basically a long horseback ride from one church to another to make room for a couple of speeches. And I LIKE the speeches, I think they’re good commentary on the themes, and they’re placed well enough to set up what’s to come, but no, the story dies there. I need something to be happening at the same time that comments on the story to come as well as the story at hand. The dialogue, when laid on the panels, must appear to be commenting on some little contest of wills, Man vs. Woman, some testing of his character by her, while actually laying out what’s going to happen. It’s the first battle. It’s a low-stakes contest.
Yeah, so that’s what’s missing. Otherwise, Act I just kind of slopes from a fight scene to a dinner conversation, to two monologues to a good, but quiet bonding moment.
And none of that makes sense to you who haven’t read the faulty script, but try it with one of your own projects. Just describe it to an audience, explain what you want to have going on, make sure it actually shows up in the text, and marvel at the realizations and associated ideas that come up in your own work.
There are a million motivators, but you can group them into general categories like air, food, drink, hygiene/health, sex, reproduction, sex, love, family, ideals, honor, glory, fame, respect, fear, justice, power, control, security, peace, hate, knowledge/wisdom, truth, etc.
That's a pretty good swath, I think. An even more general grouping would be that these motivations are biological, personal or social. You could really divvy it into pleasures and pains, with maybe a cross axis of pains to be pursued for the virtues they yield, and pleasures to be avoided for the vices they imbue. Ultimately everything becomes a carrot or a stick. But there's a terrific pyramid that every writer should memorize, called Maslow's Hierarchy.
I had a swell psychology teacher in high school who (besides telling us the Philadelphia Experiment really happened and CIA remote viewers in were horrified by what they saw in KGB black site prisons) gave us a great and memorable rundown of the field, and Maslow's pyramid always stuck with me as a great rule of thumb. It's also a great way to jump off with exceptions. If you know the template, you can come up with some great deviations. This is especially true in superhero tales, which call for freaks, geeks, uncanny, uncommon heroes, and other exceptional personalities.
But wait -- there's more! This completely unscientific (and isn't that the right and freedom of being a shaman rather than a sociologist?) grouping corresponds keenly to the structures of the human brain, at least in a poetical sense.
BIOLOGICAL--> Body. Id. Keeping the machinery greased and running. Reptilian brain.
PERSONAL--> Self. Ego. Captain of the ship. Trying to manipulate the internal systems to deal with the external ones. Or vice versa. Play them both against each other, or acting as the medium between. Mammal brain.
SOCIAL--> Community. The brass. The way things ought to be. Puts demands on the other parts without understanding the necessities of reality. Primate brain.
In the western tradition, we tend to say that a villain is the person who puts his needs above altruistic motives, or at least out of proportion to the mutual obligation to self and system. That's hardly inarguable, but a very strong ethical system. At the same time, we value independence and villify systems in which the group demands absorbs the member's individuality. So, yay, built-in tension. Personally, I think the problem is double-sided: people don't give enough to the group, but the group incessantly fails in its promises to the members. Just look at the
In closing, (since I'll assume you can think of your own great examples in comics) here are some great examples to study from the formerly barren wasteland of television. While movies stumble through the valley of remakes, sequels and adaptations of lousy ‘70s TV shows, television has entered a spectacular creative period. I credit reality TV and its hybrid “reality game show,” which got so stupid around the first time someone ate rotting food on “Fear Factor,” it actually obliterated the lowest common denominator and polarized TV into the “LOL!” camp of people who actually fall for the Nigerian E-Mail Scam, and, say, people who don’t deserve to have their reproductive organs smashed with a bag of pool balls. This latter group, driven screaming from shallow, vindictive anti-celebrities and punitive game show challenges, gave a chance to programs that might not otherwise have drawn enough of an audience to make it a few full seasons.
The Shield – this could only be a TV show. It takes such an incredible humanizing talent to make lead character Vic Mackey an effective anti-hero, by both Michael Chiklis and the people acting opposite him. Everyone on this show is dirty somehow, even if it’s via noble intentions, but you empathize with them, because it’s always the result of a spectactularly scripted compromising situation. Even when they make the right choice, which they frequently do, it puts them an even more dire situation.
Rescue Me – Almost the flip side of The Shield, Dennis Leary’s job saving lives is his life preserver whereas Chiklis’ career leads him into corruption and ruination. Both are about men you can respect and enjoy watching even if you might not like them in person.
Battlestar Galactica – A show that is one endless question about what decisions a threatened society will make to preserve itself, often at the cost of what makes it a cohesive society in the first place. Don’t let the sci-fi fool you, this is straight up about two cultures at war, and could be imported almost straight to 19th century seafaring without missing a trick.
Deadwood – Similar to BSG, it’s about what holds a society together, though the tension isn’t ratcheted quite so high, as producer David Milch likes to crystallize the action into the end product and examine the causes that bring it into occurrence. What would be a tense uncertainty on Galactica is an inevitability on Deadwood. Also has by-far the best dialogue in the history of television for sheer scale, scope and poetry.
Veronica Mars – It’s amazing they got three seasons out of this show. Terrific dialogue, winding mysteries that never felt cheap no matter how many times they twisted, and actors that could deliver the payload in their roles around cramped commercial breaks and network FCC restrictions. Mysteries are always in a tough relationship with plot because it’s so integral, unlike a comedy or horror, which might get away with ignoring its story’s momentum by distracting with entertainment. The balance of information that must be dispensed or withheld to maintain suspense is at its trickiest economics in a mystery, and Mars succeeded thoroughly.
Nip/Tuck – This one is all about character choices, and even though it gets ludicrously melodramatic during season three, it’s admirable for the ability to draw clear parallels between the guests and the main characters without feeling rote. The Sopranos never engaged me precisely because at failed at this same effort. Every B story brought in to illustrate Tony Soprano’s dilemma just seemed to put the two side by side without the one informing the other. In Nip/Tuck, the two actually interact.
Rome – Epic at the street level, Rome stuck to classicist roots of fate and destiny and the vengeance of the gods for the crimes of mortals, all while making it plain that it’s a big, cruel, savage world run by mean bastards with big swords, and there’s not much hope of help or justice.
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