Tag Archives: screenwriting

Do Your Legwork… the Proper Way

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Lately I seem to be coming across more and more authors who thumb their noses up at the thought of doing research, which makes me scratch my puzzler. Not only is it a fundamental part of the process, regardless of the type of fiction you write, it is also a chance to learn and grow as a person as well as a writer. The simple fact is, if research truly is the bane of your existence, then you’re not doing it right.

Yes, you are most likely creating an entire world from scratch, in your own image and the laws of reality obey whatever rules strike your fancy, but even the most fantastical setting must have a sturdy foundation. And that foundation must be built with bricks of solid facts in order for your story to have any sort of credence.

I personally enjoy the research stage almost as much as the construction stage, but I understand how daunting a task fact-finding can be, so I’ve jotted down a few of the steps I tend to use when I’m in that researching frame of mind:

1. Pinpoint the right questions. The assumption is that you either have a strong interest in or possess a rudimentary knowledge of the story you’re attempting to pen. And that’s all you need in the beginning when you’re plucking the idea from the ether and committing it to the page in the form of an outline. But as you rearrange the story sequentially and create scenes to flesh the idea out into proper story form, you should be asking yourself how you’re going to make the story mechanics work. If your story is a period piece, you should be knowledgeable of that era, if your main characters hold down specific jobs, you should be familiar with the basics of their occupations, if the story takes place in a different part of the world… you get the point. Your research begins when you write your outline because that’s where you’ll find the questions that need answering.

2. Locate your resources. You’re probably thinking this part’s a cinch as long as you’ve got internet access, and I can’t really argue the point. As I’ve stated in a previous post, the internet is the wise sage of our virtual village (see: Applying Life Lessons To Your Writing) but, as is true with a great deal of online content, the reliability of the source material found therein can be erroneous, so verify, verify, verify as best you can in order to avoid unnecessary embarrassment at a later date. Myself, I tend to be a bit old-fashioned in my approach to research and armed with my trusty dusty library card I visit ye olde public bibliotheca in search of books pertaining to the various subjects in my story. I only rely on the internet as a back-up resource if I come up empty at the library.

3. Make a treasure map for your gold. What good is that golden nugget bit of research that you’ve discovered if you can’t lay your hands on it when you need it? If you own the book, sure you can bookmark or dog-ear pages, underline or highlight passages–but only if you own the book, please, marking up someone else’s tome is utter book sacrilege. If the book isn’t yours to mar, you can create your own index system by jotting down the book title, page and paragraph numbers, and a few keywords on the passage’s content. Then when you’re done info-gathering, you can transfer the text to your computer (arranged by subject headings) or to a notepad if you prefer to write longhand.

4. Create a vision board. Sounds hokey, I know, but pictures have that magical ability to transport your fertile imagination to all the unfamiliar aspects within your story and adding a visual component to your research and writing can help to serve as inspiration for time periods, locales, era clothing, vehicles, weaponry, etc.

5. Walk around in your story like you own the place. Nothing worse than a writer who lacks the confidence to strut their stuff within the world they’ve created. Even if that world is rife with utter nonsense, your job is to sell that nonsense as truth. There’s a saying that used to be popular when I wore a younger man’s clothes, but I haven’t come across it in a dog’s age, “If you can’t blind them with brilliance, baffle them with bullshit.” Now, this doesn’t mean you should out-and-out lie to your audience, but if the moment arrives when research fails and you need to invent something in order to make your story work, you should endeavor to portray it with as much authenticity as possible.

All the rest of the time? You live up to the trust that your audience places in your hands by checking and double-checking your sources and making sure your facts are as accurate as they can be. Also, you need to keep in mind that despite your best efforts, you aren’t ever going to get the facts correct all the time, but that doesn’t give you a reason not to do your due diligence. And should you ever deliberately decide to ignore the facts, you should alert your audience either in the author’s notes or afterword.

One of a writer’s biggest attractions to the written art form can be best summed up as, ex nihilo omnia fiunt–from nothing, everything is created–but we owe a duty to our audience to make the lie of fiction as truthful as possible.

Sally forth and be researchful.

Joyce Carol Oates’ Top 10 Tweet Tips on Writing

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1) Write your heart out.

2) The first sentence can be written only after the last sentence has been written. FIRST DRAFTS ARE HELL. FINAL DRAFTS, PARADISE.

3) You are writing for your contemporaries–not for Posterity. If you are lucky, your contemporaries will become Posterity.

4) Keep in mind Oscar Wilde: “A little sincerity is a dangerous thing, and a great deal of it is absolutely fatal.”

5) When in doubt how to end a chapter, bring in a man with a gun. (This is Raymond Chandler’s advice, not mine. I would not try this.)

6) Unless you are experimenting with form–gnarled, snarled & obscure–be alert for possibilities of paragraphing.

7) Be your own editor/ critic. Sympathetic but merciless!

8) Don’t try to anticipate an ideal reader–or any reader. He/ she might exist–but is reading someone else.

9) Read, observe, listen intensely!–as if your life depended upon it.

10) Write your heart out.

Eleven Thoughts on Fiction

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1. “Fiction reveals truths that reality obscures.” — Jessamyn West

2. “Truth may be stranger than fiction, but fiction is truer.” — Frederic Raphael

3. “Fiction’s about what it is to be a human being.” — David Foster Wallace

4. “First-rate fiction lays hands on the reader, to heal him or rough him up or, ideally, to do both.” — Ellen Currie

5. “The trouble with fiction is that it makes too much sense, whereas reality never makes sense.” — Aldous Huxley

6. “Details make stories human, and the more human a story can be, the better.” — V.S. Pritchett

7. “Character is the very life of fiction. Setting exists so that the character has someplace to stand. Plot exists so the character can discover what he is really like, forcing the character to choice and action. And theme exists only to make the character stand up and be somebody.” — John Gardner

8. “In writing fiction, the more fantastic the tale, the plainer the prose should be. Don’t ask your readers to admire your words when you want them to believe your story.” — Ben Bova

9. “Basically, fiction is people. You can’t write fiction about ideas.” — Theodore Sturgeon

10. “Structure is the key to narrative. These are the crucial questions any storyteller must answer: Where does it begin? Where does the beginning start to end and the middle begin? Where does the middle start to end and the end begin?” — Nora Ephron

11. “Fiction is a lie, and good fiction is the truth inside the lie.” — Stephen King

The Three Characteristics of Successful Fiction

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Three characteristics a work of fiction must possess in order to be successful:

1. It must have a precise and suspenseful plot.

2. The author must feel a passionate urge to write it.

3. He must have the conviction, or at least the illusion, that he is the only one who can handle this particular theme.

— Isaac Bashevis Singer

The Ten (Plus Four) Commandments (of Writing)

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1. “The one great rule of composition is to speak the truth.” — Henry David Thoreau

2. “If you require a practical rule of me, I will present you with this: Whenever you feel an impulse to perpetrate a piece of exceptionally fine writing, obey it–wholeheartedly–and delete it before sending your manuscript to press. Murder your darlings.” — Arthur Quiller-Couch

3. “The best rule for writing–as well as for speaking—is to use always the simplest words that will accurately convey your thought.” — David Lambuth

4. “There are simple maxims . . . which I think might be commended to writers of expository prose. First: never use a long word if a short one will do. Second: if you want to make a statement with a great many qualifications, put some of the qualifications in separate sentences. Third: do not let the beginning of your sentence lead the readers to an expectation which is contradicted by the end.” — Bertrand Russell

5. “I have made three rules of writing for myself that are absolutes: Never take advice. Never show or discuss a work in progress. Never answer a critic.” — Raymond Chandler

6. “There are three rules for writing the novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.” — W. Somerset Maugham

7. “Writing has laws of perspective, of light and shade, just as painting does, or music. If you are born knowing them, fine. If not, learn them. Then rearrange the rules to suit yourself.” — Truman Capote

8. “There is probably some long-standing “rule” among writers, journalists, and other word-mongers that says: “When you start stealing from your own work you’re in bad trouble.” And it may be true.” — Hunter S. Thompson

9. “If I were to advise new writers, if I were to advise the new writer in myself, going into the theater of the Absurd, the almost-Absurd, the theater of Ideas, the any-kind-of-theater-at-all, I would advise like this:

  • Tell me no pointless jokes. I will laugh at your refusal to allow me laughter.
  • Build me no tension toward tears and refuse me my lamentations. I will go find me better wailing walls.
  • Do not clench my fists for me and hide the target. I might strike you, instead.
  • Above all, sicken me not unless you show me the way to the ship’s rail.”

— Ray Bradbury

10. “Breslin’s Rule: Don’t trust a brilliant idea unless it survives the hangover.” — Jimmy Breslin

11. “One of the great rules of art: Do not linger.” — Andre Gide

12. “Do not pay any attention to the rules other people make…. They make them for their own protection, and to Hell with them.” — William Saroyan

13. “Over the years, I’ve found one rule. It is the only one I give on those occasions when I talk about writing. A simple rule. If you tell yourself you are going to be at your desk tomorrow, you are by that declaration asking your unconscious to prepare the material. You are, in effect, contracting to pick up such valuables at a given time. Count on me, you are saying to a few forces below: I will be there to write.” — Norman Mailer

14. “I’ll give you the sole secret of short-story writing, and here it is: Rule 1. Write stories that please yourself. There is no rule 2. The technical points you can get from Bliss Perry. If you can’t write a story that pleases yourself, you will never please the public. But in writing the story forget the public.” — O. Henry

Of Inspiration and Imagination

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1. “Imagination is the real and eternal world of which this vegetable universe is but a faint shadow.” — William Blake

2. “An idea, like a ghost, must be spoken to a little before it will explain itself.” — Charles Dickens

3. “If writers had to wait until their precious psyches were completely serene there wouldn’t be much writing done.” — William Styron

4. “I sit in the dark and wait for a little flame to appear at the end of my pencil.” — Billy Collins

5. “Use your imagination. Trust me, your lives are not interesting. Don’t write them down.” — W.P. Kinsella

6. “You get ideas from daydreaming. You get ideas from being bored. You get ideas all the time. The only difference between writers and other people is we notice when we’re doing it.” — Neil Gaiman

7. “You go to the attic of your mind and rummage around and find something.” — Mary Higgins Clark

8. “Thinking is the enemy of creativity. It’s self-conscious, and anything self-conscious is lousy. You can’t try to do things. You simply must do things.” — Ray Bradbury

The Best Judge of Character? Why, 10 Famous Authors, Naturally

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1. “Creation of character is, like much of fiction writing, a mixture of subjective feel and objective control.” — Julian Barnes

2. “Characters are not created by writers. They pre-exist and have to be found.” — Elizabeth Bowen

3. “The characters that I create are parts of myself and I send them on little missions to find out what I don’t know yet.” — Gail Godwin

4. “I don’t have a very clear idea of who the characters are until they start talking.” — Joan Didion

5. “I visualize the characters completely; I have heard their dialogue. I know how they speak, what they want, who they are, nearly everything about them.” — Joyce Carol Oates

6. “When I write, I live with my characters. It’s like going to work. You see the people at the next desk in full regalia all the time, and you know where they came from and where they are going. The point is to define the nuances of everything that’s happening with them and to find the element of their lives that is fascinating enough to record. That takes a lot of doing.” — William Kennedy

7. “Don’t write about a character. Become that character, and then write your story.” — Ethan Canin

8. “The character that lasts is an ordinary guy with some extraordinary qualities.” — Raymond Chandler

9. “It doesn’t matter if your lead character is good or bad. He just has to be interesting, and he has to be good at what he does.” — David Chase

10. “Think of your main characters as dinner guests. Would your friends want to spend ten hours with the characters you’ve created? Your characters can be loveable, or they can be evil, but they’d better be compelling.” — Po Bronson

Elizabeth Bowen’s 7 Tips on Approaching Dialogue

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1. Dialogue should be brief.

2. It should add to the reader’s present knowledge.

3. It should eliminate the routine exchanges of ordinary conversation.

4. It should convey a sense of spontaneity but eliminate the repetitiveness of real talk.

5. It should keep the story moving forward.

6. It should be revelatory of the speaker’s character, both directly and indirectly.

7. It should show the relationships among people.

10 Thoughts on Dialogue From Notable Authors

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1. “Dialogue has to show not only something about the speaker that is its own revelation, but also maybe something about the speaker that he doesn’t know but the other character does know.” — Eudora Welty

2. “Dialogue in fiction should be reserved for the culminating moments and regarded as the spray into which the great wave of narrative breaks in curving toward the watcher on the shore.” — Edith Wharton

3. “Good writers do not litter their sentences with adverbial garbage. They do not hold up signs reading ‘laughter!’ or ‘applause!’ The content of dialogue ought to suggest the mood.” — James J. Kilpatrick

4. “Nouns, verbs, are the workhorses of language. Especially in dialogue, don’t say, ‘she said mincingly,’ or ‘he said boisterously.’ Just say, ‘he said, she said.’” — John P. Marquand

5. “A man or woman who does not write good dialog is not a first-rate writer.” — George V. Higgins

6. “Dialogue that is written in dialect is very tiring to read. If you can do it brilliantly, fine. If other writers read your work and rave about your use of dialect, go for it. But be positive that you do it well, because otherwise it is a lot of work to read short stories or novels that are written in dialect. It makes our necks feel funny.” — Anne Lamott

7. “Dialogue which does not move the story along, or add to the mood of the story, or have an easily definable reason for being there at all (such as to establish important characterization), should be considered superfluous and therefore cut.” — Bill Pronzini

8. “To write successful dialogue the author must have access to the mind of all his characters, but the reader must not perceive any more than he would in real life.” — William Sloane

9. “Don’t write stage directions. If it is not apparent what the character is trying to accomplish by saying the line, telling us how the character said it, or whether or not she moved to the couch isn’t going to aid the case. We might understand better what the character means but we aren’t particularly going to care.” – David Mamet

10, “Remember that you should be able to identify each character by what he or she says. Each one must sound different from the others. And they should not all sound like you.” — Anne Lamott

A Special Brand of Bravery

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In yesterday’s post, villains took center stage so it’s only fitting that the heroes receive a little equal time. In a future post I plan on discussing the anatomy of a hero (all right, guttermind, give it a rest) but today I’d like to explore the key ingredient your protagonist must possession to some degree in order to attract your audience and keep them invested:

Bravery.

And it should come as no surprise to any of you that if I’ve brought the subject up, there must be more than one type of courage you may either instill or bestow upon your hapless hero:

1. Heroic Bravery is the most typical brand of courage found in fictional characters nowadays, where the protagonist places themselves in jeopardy for the protection of others or to further a cause in which they passionately believe, knowing in their heart of hearts that the risk to their own well-being is completely worth it.

2. Steadfast Bravery is usually displayed by someone who routinely endures a mental or physical dangerous situation and challenges fate by meeting it head on with patient doggedness every single day.

3. Quiet Bravery, often confused with cowardice, is an offshoot of steadfast bravery where the situations are less physically dangerous. Protagonists maintain their sense of self-worth and hope as they handle their business with grace and patience.

4. Personal Bravery is exactly what it says on the tin. The protagonist risks everything for a chance at a better life as they pursue their seemingly impossible dreams. This type of bravery speaks to us all as we’ve all experienced it in some fashion at one time or another.

5. Devil-May-Care Bravery comes from protagonists that feel they have nothing left to live for–the loss of everything dear to them, a terminal illness, etc.–so they display insane courage in order to meet their inevitable death with open arms on their terms.

6. Frightened Bravery is easily the most interesting type of courage to explore within a protagonist. A character that normally chooses flight in fight-or-flight situations that has either mentally or physically been backed into a corner and forced to face their fears and rise above them can be viewed as the bravest of all the courageous archetypes (and it makes for one hell of a character arc).

The best thing about these? You’re not limited to one type per character, in fact, your protagonist may display each and every one of these types of bravery as they trod along their hero’s path. Your job as creator is to recognize which category suits your character best in order to fully flesh them out on the page.

Sally forth bravely and be writeful.