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Written by Jeffery Stevenson
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Tuesday, 08 February 2005 |
Quick note: the editing series of articles will continue with the next update. In the meantime, enjoy this article on balancing your writing.
The word "happiness" would lose its meaning if it were not balanced by sadness."
...Carl Gustav Jung
Balance becomes a natural part of warfare when you constantly confront situations like attacking, retreating, fighting, surrendering, life, and death. The strategist learns the equilibrium of things to manage the various battles that ultimately determine the outcome of the war. How far can the leader expand an army before resources become a factor? How many men can be safely sacrificed to achieve a specific goal? Which battles should be chosen to commit valuable, finite equipment, men, and money to? How far can the men be pushed before fatigue and morale impact their efficiency?
For the writer, there's a balance to storytelling that can feel a lot like warfare with yourself... your editor... your artist. How far can I expand my story before disinterest becomes a factor? How many ideas can be sacrificed to keep your story exciting yet focused? Which scenes should be cut to fit within the finite number of pages you have to tell your story? How far can your characters be pushed before readers begin to think of them as unbelievable... as something they can no longer associate with?
As writers learn the craft, balance isn't really considered until much later. But balance can improve many aspects of your story. Let's look at a few ways to use balance to take your story to the next level:
- Time is of the essence. In comic books, you write the story, someone edits the story, someone draws the story, someone inks the story, someone colors the story, someone letters the story, and someone puts it all together for publication. But guess what? The story you write becomes the critical factor in every step that follows. Sure, you can meet your individual deadline for writing the script, but what happens after that. Can your script impact the rest of the team's ability to meet their deadlines? Yes, it can.
Did you write highly detailed visuals in every panel on every page? The artist working on your project has to draw all that (and then the inker has to ink it...and then the colorist has a turn with it). It can be like writing a half or a full page panel description for every panel. There's just so much you can type in a certain amount of time. The same goes for artists. You might be working with a drawing speed demon, but a script like that can cut into their productivity. Think of how you can balance your story to give the artist a better chance to meet their deadline. Got a page that calls for a lot of detail? Use simpler visuals later on to help compensate the time the artist will need to spend on those detailed pages.
Now, did you write a standard novel page worth of words in your dialogue for each and every page? The letterer on your project has to make all that fit... and the artist needs to adjust their layouts and panel compositions to handle all that. More work for them can translate into the team hitting that deadline barrier. Sure, you can still have those mammoth conversations from time-to-time, but remember to keep things balanced. Give them a page every so often with no or little dialogue to give them a break, and maybe even get ahead with their deadline.
Take a moment with your rough draft and think about how your descriptions and dialogue will impact the rest of the team... and see if there's a way to balance it out.
- Adjust your contrast. How would you feel about watching a movie that's all action? Nothing else... just action scene after action scene. If you're a fan of action, you'd probably be excited about it, but after a while, even that much excitement could fade. What's at stake for the hero? "Not sure... he's too busy fighting." What's he trying to accomplish? "Looks like he's shooting for 100mph driving through L.A. traffic right now." And on the flip-side, what if it's all talk? Talk, talk, talk, talk, talk. Just some friends hanging out and talking about their lives, their families, their scary (and drunken) farm stories. Could be interesting and fascinating... but it could also be so much more if they actually took action and did something.
Now, what if you had some characters talking to each other, and as they begin to share their tender moment, the action kicks in? Or you could follow up some action with some dramatic tension. Show what's cool and exciting about the character (she's mastered 300 different styles of kung-fu), but be sure to balance it out with the strong character moments (she works three part-time jobs where she can help the less fortunate to keep her grounded in the real world of non-fighting people). This contrast in the portrayal of your characters strengthens the story as a whole. Wouldn't you feel more involved with the action if you actually cared enough to root for the hero? Wouldn't the action seem livelier after you've caught your breathe and reeled back in your senses while the pace slows down to talk things out or slows down to reveal character-defining actions?
But action and talking aren't the only contrasts in a story. A series of simple visuals leading up to a nice, heavily detailed page can play up the contrast aspects of a story. A drastic shift in settings. An association of a character as average and ordinary with a stunning character revelation later in the story. A shift in mood... time... lighting... narration. It's a balance of opposites in order to help bring out the best of each side like the composition of a page where you deal with the balance of negative and positive space. You don't want either one of those aspects to overpower the other... you just want enough of each to clearly make your point and make people take notice of it.
Contrast in your story is like a see-saw. Too much on one end, and you don't really go anywhere. But distribute weight to both sides to balance things out a little and things can get moving.
- Finish what you've started. Most stories generally have some elements that balance each other out to keep the story flowing along, and to see this, you can just break a story down to its basic structures. Overall, a story has a beginning and an ending. Each sequence of events in your story has a start and an end. Each scene in those sequences begins and ends. And within each scene, you have a series of actions (beginning of something happening) and reactions (ending/conclusion to it that rolls into a new beginning). Or as Newton's third law of motion goes (since we do want to keep our story in motion), "For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction."
When something happens in your story, is there an appropriate response? If your character gets a paper cut in the library, does he scream and cuss drawing attention to himself? Does he go up to the librarian to give her the puppy eyes and weasel a bandage from her... and potentially invoke her bookish wrath? Does the paper cut get his blood on the book that later gets traced back to him during a murder investigation (some reactions can be delayed in your story)? Or does it just wind up being ignored? If it's ignored...and nothing comes of it later on, what's the point of having this paper cut in the story? If you finish what you start, it drives the balancing act that helps give your fiction a logical baseline that helps with believability. It makes it feel like (given the circumstances) it could really happen like that because every action is met with an appropriate response.
This balancing principle can be followed throughout your story's structure as long as you continue to finish what you've started. Start your story off with a murder? Make sure you finish it and resolve the mystery of that murder at the end of your story. Introduce a subplot within the framework of your story? Make sure you tie off that loose end before your story finishes. Try to keep this in mind as you tighten up your story, and your overall story will have a tendency to balance itself out.
"But Jeff, you're stifling my creativity by putting all these restrictions on what I should do in my scripts." Wouldn't exploring different methods of telling your story while keeping it balanced wind up being a greater showing of creativity? Don't think of these as restrictions... feel free to balance things as much or as little as you like. These are mostly situations to keep in mind after you have your rough draft done, and you're prepping it to send off. A quick checklist to run through and make sure you've considered all the factors involved in getting your story finished and on the shelves. Besides, if you're known for telling good stories and managing to keep books on schedule, wouldn't those be good traits for a freelancer to offer a publisher?
... Feel free to discuss this article in the Scryptic forum for The Art of Words.
Jeffery Stevenson is one of the Scryptic Studios co-founders. He's generally considered crazy by his peers, but he just looks at it as a "fresh and exciting perspective of the world." He drinks lots of caffeine, sleeps very little, and knows cryptic survival skills such as the ability to start a fire in the rain. He also writes (and letters) some weekly webcomic. Oh, and this one too. I think he also does some weekly satire thingy. Check his member page here at Scryptic for more details.
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