Storytelling Heft? (2022/2023)
fiction should slap you in the face and kick you in the gut and spit in your mouth otherwise what’s the point? lol. being dramatic. it could also massage the knots out of your muscles, caress your hair
a really good bit of fiction becomes load-bearing in a meaning sense
“no one will remember if we are good men or bad”
game of thrones: more people died than expected
andor: more people died than expected
arcane: more people died than expected
god of war: mom died
batman: parents died
superman: entire planet died
death introduces stakes, it rips open a hole in your airplane and sucks the air out. we all die eventually. death leaves us maimed and wounded and gasping, bleeding out, in shock. we have to stop the bleeding. i was afraid to talk about death in introspect because i am not a doctor, i am not a priest, i am just some guy. but sometimes i think people need to hear from just some guy. i’m in here with you and i’m trying my best.
Villain wants radical change https://twitter.com/visakanv/status/1449766771230085128?s=21&t=i6OYcbN4QGXVWSDaACc9OA
San Francisco… romantic in a way
Type of guy https://twitter.com/self_beware/status/1557895004072292352?s=21&t=znTxe7YZOcNmguD1laETKA
Ea
Unintegrated wannabe
Gleeful enforcers
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you cannot simply kill the demon guardian, unleash the archdemon, and then pat yourself on the back for having performed a heroic deed when you actually just made the world worse
“Good Sir Knight, if you kill the Thieflord, his minions and underlings will conduct warfare to decide upon a new Thieflord. There will be more cruelty and violence than before.”
Ah, but you shall be free!
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“Faye is dead”
“the best of them are.”
older history, ruins
occurs to me that we are still in the early days of wedding-as-spectacle
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Emma Coats’ 22 Rules
Emma Coats is a storyteller who used to work at Pixar. In 2012, she wrote a series of tweets with the hashtag #storybasics. I refer to them from time to time. Here they are:
#1: You admire a character for trying more than for their successes.
#2: You gotta keep in mind what’s interesting to you as an audience, not what’s fun to do as a writer. They can be v. different.
#3: Trying for theme is important, but you won’t see what the story is actually about til you’re at the end of it. Now rewrite.
#4: Once upon a time there was ___. Every day, ___. One day ___. Because of that, ___. Because of that, ___. Until finally ___.
#5: Simplify. Focus. Combine characters. Hop over detours. You’ll feel like you’re losing valuable stuff but it sets you free.
#6: What is your character good at, comfortable with? Throw the polar opposite at them. Challenge them. How do they deal?
#7: Come up with your ending before you figure out your middle. Seriously. Endings are hard, get yours working up front.
#8: Finish your story, let go even if it’s not perfect. In an ideal world you have both, but move on. Do better next time.
#9: When you’re stuck, make a list of what WOULDN’T happen next. Lots of times the material to get you unstuck will show up.
#10: Pull apart the stories you like. What you like in them is a part of you; you’ve got to recognize it before you can use it.
#11: Putting it on paper lets you start fixing it. If it stays in your head, a perfect idea, you’ll never share it with anyone.
#12: Discount the 1st thing that comes to mind. And the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th – get the obvious out of the way. Surprise yourself.
#13: Give your characters opinions. Passive/malleable might seem likable to you as you write, but it’s poison to the audience.
#14: Why must you tell THIS story? What’s the belief burning within you that your story feeds off of? That’s the heart of it.
#15: If you were your character, in this situation, how would you feel? Honesty lends credibility to unbelievable situations.
#16: What are the stakes? Give us reason to root for the character. What happens if they don’t succeed? Stack the odds against.
#17: No work is ever wasted. If it’s not working, let go and move on – it’ll come back around to be useful later.
#18: You have to know yourself: the difference between doing your best & fussing. Story is testing, not refining.
#19: Coincidences to get characters into trouble are great; coincidences to get them out of it are cheating.
#20: Exercise: take the building blocks of a movie you dislike. How d’you rearrange them into what you DO like?
#21: You gotta identify with your situation/characters, can’t just write ‘cool’. What would make YOU act that way?
#22: What’s the essence of your story? Most economical telling of it? If you know that, you can build out from there.
Likeable characters
What makes characters likeable? (WIP)
Hateable characters
Interesting characters
The most interesting characters of a show is rarely the primary protagonist. Sometimes it’s the antagonist, but more often than not I think the most interesting characters happen somewhere in between. Batman has quite interesting villains in the Joker, the Riddler and Two-Face, but I think even then, characters like Harley Quinn and Selena Kyle can be more interesting.
Who’s the most interesting character in Game of Thrones? It’s easy to root for Jon Snow, Dany T and Tyrion Lannister – they are the obvious choices. The interesting characters to me are people like Littlefinger and Varys.
What about breaking bad? Mike and Saul are obviously more interesting than Walt, his family, or anybody from the cartels.
Someone pointed out that when you rewatch How I Met Your Mother as an adult, you realise that it’s Marshall trying to be a decent person while everyone else around him is being stupid.
The words that come to my mind while thinking about this are “fringes” and “on the edge of complexity”, “shoreline”. I’m thinking about this show I watched – Human Planet – that demonstrated how the people living in the arctic regions would wait for the tides to recede under the ice, and then go hunting for clams and mussels and stuff that are left behind. It’s the goldilocks zone. The character isn’t forced by the narrative to be Good or Bad, and so they get to be Interesting instead.
I enjoy Iron Man. Everyone loves to make fun of Justin Hammer, but I think he’s the most interesting character in the movie trilogy.
Bucky / The Winter Soldier might be more interesting than Steve Rogers.
Who’s the most interesting character in Harry Potter? It can’t be Harry, Voldemort or Dumbledore. These folks were ‘chosen’ by their circumstances. Voldemort was born to be a villain, Harry was born to be hero. Dumbledore might have had an interesting past, but he was positioned to be Merlin the moment the book started. The interesting character is Snape.
These are the characters who struggle with who they are. These are the characters we can’t be certain about.
Who’s the most interesting character in The West Wing? It’s not Bartlet, it’s not Seaborn. It’s probably the detestable John Hoynes. I think they made it too easy for us to decide that we disliked him.
In the movie Lord of War, it might be ‘the protagonist’ – because he’s not really the hero. The real hero is Ethan Hawke’s character, who is morally righteous and good.
In Mean Girls, if it’s not Cady, it’s Janis. Everyone loves or hates Regina, but in that regard she cannot be an interesting character.
In the Rocky series, it could’ve been the shitty brother-in-law, if he was given more room.
In The Matrix, it could’ve been Cypher, or Switch, or Niobe, or the Merovingian.
In the Lord of the Rings, it would not be Frodo, Aragorn, Gandalf or Sauron – it would be Gollum, Boromir, even Denethor…
I think a lot of authors get very carried away with their love for their protagonists or antagonists, or the struggle between the two, that they don’t give their ‘middle’ characters the loving attention that they deserve.
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It’s not always necessary to tell a story where there are “third party characters” who are the most interesting ones… it just seems that this is the space where really interesting, nuanced characters can thrive.
Relatable Antagonists
In general, movies/films etc work a lot better (at least for me) when we’re allowed to sympathize with the antagonist. I think Lord of War is great because of that. The real enemy isn’t any particular agent of evil, but human nature itself.
A Few Good Men would’ve been better if we were able to sympathize more with Colonel Jessup, rather than have him be this unlikeable asshole. He did strongly believe that he was trying to protect his men, and he was following a code of honor that made sense to him. We should’ve been allowed to appreciate that. Same for, say, The Matrix, or V for Vendetta, or Star Wars… those films all feel good because we root for the underdog against this Big Bad.But that’s far too easy, and kinda disingenuous. (OK there’s probably some nuance in Star Wars about Darth Vader that I’m missing…)
IIRC, Ender’s Game does a pretty good job of this with Colonel Graff – he’s sending children to war, but rationalizes it saying (paraphrased) “I’ll commit war crimes if it means that’s an Earth left at the end to put me on trial.” (Also the whole Speaker For The Dead thing.) I think Ray Bradbury does a good job with this in The Martian Chronicles – there’s an officer who realizes that his enemy/counterpart shares more of his values than his own men.
I think part of what made The Dark Knight so good (need to rewatch this) is that they made The Joker and Harvey Dent relatable – they’re really just tired of bullshit and bureaucracy, and we can all relate to that. I remember lots of people dressing up as The Joker afterwards for Halloween and such – definitely more than the number of people who dress up as Batman – which I think is an interesting goal to strive for, as a storyteller.
I think we need more art and storytelling like that. In a way, the Big Bad films of our time do us a great disservice. When I get around to writing/publishing novels, I think one of my main goals is to write really relatable antagonists. What would Lord of the Rings be like if Sauron was the character we empathized with most? We wouldn’t necessarily need to SUPPORT him, but we should be made uncomfortable by seeing how he represents the sort of exploitative industrial-military complex that we’re all tacitly complicit in. Tolkien’s biggest innovation I think was the character of Gollum – everyone else pretty much plays the stock roles that’s expected of them, but Gollum is complex and conflicted, which is what’s interesting. JK Rowling did something similar with Snape, who is as a character more compelling and interesting than either Harry or Voldemort. He can “go either way” in a way that neither of them could. And I suppose Shakespeare did this with a lot of his characters, as did Tolstoy, and Balzac.
I wonder– using a “minimum viable” approach to writing – if the smart way to start writing these things is to start with the Smeagols and Snapes and Anakins – because starting with “Hero + Mentor Vs Villain” is too predictable.
This also applies well to Lindsay Lohan’s character in Mean Girls. Again and again I think that’s what makes for really compelling, engaging characters. As children we want picture-perfect heroes to look up to, but as we get older we want conflicted characters who embody our own conflicts and struggles.
Links:
Wisecrack philosophy of Joker (makes me think of nerdwriter’s Gotham as a character)
Loyalty Missions
An interesting trope in video games (and I suppose also in anime, movies, stories of all kinds) is loyalty missions – when you, the hero, go on a quest on behalf of one of your party members, and in the process of that you earn their deep and true friendship.
Feels
This is a post to aggregate things that have moved me.
"Tropes That Move Visa To Tears" Thread
— Visakan Veerasamy (@visakanv) December 25, 2017
Connection plot:
Challenge plot
Old man nursing home ad
Sacrifice
The Expanse – black girl and big beltalowda
More in this Twitter thread:
Tropes / Movie / Plot effectiveness
- Migrants / Xmen
- Tolkien / WW1
- Bystander effect
- teamwork
- FF7
- Avengers
- sacrifice
- avengers
- transformers 2
- individual’s development being reflected by affecting/changing others (Shepard, Leslie Knope)
- Oogway/Shifu… Gandalf