Letting the Monster Out

Recently, Charles expressed his disappointment in a story he read. The lead character (name of Edge), a cold-eyed killer (and borderline psychopath) now retired, spends most of the book trying to stay out of trouble. Until, of course, it's time to strap on his guns again.

The formula is tried and true. Shane. Pale Rider. Unforgiven. Sin City: A Dame to Kill For. The Big Boss. Hell, the true story of Cincinnatus. One of drama's favorite 'guns on the mantelpiece' is the bad-ass who's trying to hold back.

The book Charles read didn't work, and I thought I knew why. The hero's arc failed in two places: the start and the end.

Drama is about contrast. No matter what genre, the hero or heroine ends the story in a very different place from where they started. Bridget Jones starts her story miserable, alone and embarrassed at the turkey curry buffet, and she ends the next Christmas happy, in love and immune to anything her mother might say. We meet Harry Potter unloved, disregarded and the absolute bottom of the heap, positively hated by his adoptive parents and living in a cupboard under the stairs. By the end of that first story, he is the hero of his school, loved by all. Othello, on the other hand, starts his story a celebrated hero, saviour of the city with the most beautiful woman he's ever seen for his bride. By the end, both he and Desdemona are dead by his own hand.

Rule of thumb: the lower the hero starts, the higher he'll end up. Or vice versa. Sometimes, it can be both. The detective may end the story with all the answers and his life in ruins. All I'm saying, there's a reason you see a lot more rags-to-riches stories than rags-to-lower middle class.

Back to the Retired Gunslinger. This character always starts as a bad-ass held in check. Always.

Shane and the Preacher (the Mysterious Stranger in Pale Rider) are both introduced fronting off groups of thugs with little more than an icy glare and a palpable sense of menace. How do we know they're bad-asses? Groups of asshole bullies take one look at them and run away.

Chen (Bruce Lee's character in The Big Boss) and Dwight from A Dame to Kill For show the natures they're hiding in action. When Chen's cousins end up in a fight, Bruce Lee uses grace, skill and a deft comic touch to show us that he really could've whupped those bullies butts the whole time, only he promised his momma he wouldn't fight. Dwight stops an attempted murder with a single knockout blow, and his voiceover tells us directly how much he enjoys it, how tempting it is to 'let the monster out'. We soon learn he no longer drinks, smokes, won't even let himself exceed the speed limit for fear he'll turn that monster inside him loose.

Remember: the Retired Gunfighter is *not* a changed man. He may think he is. He may argue that he is, act like he is, do everything he believes a changed man would do. But *we* need to see that old Monster still lurking under his skin, sniffing the air and waiting for a chance to slip its chain.

We need to see that no matter how much the Retired Gunfighter might lie to himself, whatever it might cost him, part of him wants that monster loose.

And when our hero does finally let that monster out, WATCH OUT! We've watched our hero suffer through three-quarters of the story resisting his natural urges. His half-measure compromises have failed: the monster inside gloated and the villains still won. In the end, there's nothing left for it but to cut loose.

And here's the thing about cutting loose: you've gotta go big. BIG!

Shane guns down the hired killer, the ranch boss and everyone else in the saloon that night. Preacher blows up a strip-mine and wipes out the villain's whole gang. Dwight comes back with a brand new face, a duffel bag full of explosives, a ninja accomplice and a .25 automatic tucked up his sleeve. And in The Big Boss, Bruce Lee stabs the local drug lord to death with his own fingers.

Big.

I'm thinking this is why the book Charles read failed. The killer, Edge, starts out pretty whimpy (okay, cool), but he goes wrong in one important way. Maybe more: I don't know if we get to see what total bad-assery he's holding back, or if we get a sense for how very badly he wants to let that beast free. But I do know this: he carries his gun with him in a carpet bag.

To me, that's a fatal flaw.

And when the rough stuff does start again, he emerges quite a bit less violent than he used to be, with a greater regard for law and order. Wtf?

I call it 'muted arc', or rags-to-lower middle class: the character's changes simply aren't big enough. By keeping his pistol nearby (though not on his hip), Edge is making a definite statement. Contrast it with Preacher in the Pale Rider, who needs days of hard riding to reach the steel box where he's locked away his guns.

And Shane, Preacher, Chen, Dwight, any Retired Gunslinger you can think of, all give us a sense that their violence at the end is worse than they ever were back in their bad old days. They may suffer for unleashing their violence (Shane is badly wounded, maybe fatally. Chen goes to prison.), or they may simply have to live with this poisonous knowledge about themselves.

No way should it actually be better. Shane can't strap on his guns, give the hired killer a flesh wound and have the ranch owner surrender without further bloodshed. And then go off with the lesson that the answer is moderate amounts of violence...

A Sudden Sense of Reversal

Avery asked about my cryptic little plot drawing posted earlier. Now, it's probably because of the art-thing that I relate to my plot as a graph, but the principle behind that drawing is fundamental to all dramatic narrative. I'm talking about sudden reversal.

Basically, each act in your story should end with a sudden and dramatic reversal of situation. With that drawing, I was charting my big reversals at the act climaxes. Because that's the heart of the Act: a sudden and major flip in the plot. Boy meets Girl. (yay!) Boy loses Girl. (no!) Boy gets Girl back! (YAY!) Old as the hills and just as solid.

And it's not just the Acts. Every scene will be about a reversal in some element of your plot. Every. Scene. (That's not counting Sequels, mind.)

(I've just sat here for half an hour trying to use my own WiP to show what I'm talking about, without much success. I'm too deep into it right now, so I'm going to look elsewhere for examples)

In the typical hardboiled detective story, the private eye is warned off the case (they're scared, high value) in the middle of the first Act, has the crap beaten out of him at the Act Climax, digs deeper and muddles around until the Act II climax sees him close in on the truth, usually resulting in the prospect of his emminent death.

In Silence of the Lambs, Clarice's conscious desire is to get Hannibal Lecter's help in stopping Buffalo Bill. Her unconscious, deeper, more powerful drive is for advancement.

The opening shots show her straining and struggling through a cadet obstacle course - a *very* low value for advancement. Then she gets her shot with the introduction of her conscious desire: get Lecter on board, it'll look good on your record. She enters the prison with her good bag and cheap shoes and freshly-laminated ID - her pride at this big step like a halo around her. By the end of that scene, she's been refused and mocked by Lecter and had a psycopath splatter her with semen - a distinct reversal.

But in the seeds of that humiliation lie the next reversal: Lecter dangles a clue that leads to a severed head in a storage locker. Clarice looks good again.

And so it goes. Up and down, up and down, a little bit up and a LOT further down, until her conscious desire is blown out of the water in the Act II Climax (Lecter sure as shit ain't gonna help once he's escaped!) and she's left back at the Academy with nothing.

Until she finds the notes written on the map...

As an aside, had it ever occured to you that saving the victim is in fact a subplot? Catherine isn't taken until the end of Act I, and much as Clarice may have a deep-seated childhood desire to save one lamb from screaming (hence her career choice), she doesn't seem to hold out much hope. If anything, she seems to share Crawford's opportunistic view that saving a Senator's daughter isn't the worst thing that could happen. They care about the girl, but they care about their careers too...

But I digress.

My point is, every scene you write, it should involve your conflicts headed up a little, or down a lot. Until things seem hopeless, and your hero or heroine has to dig deep to solve the problem.

You just gotta keep flipping the script!

Full Throttle Daily Wordcout-O-Meter stands at 32,100 words. I think, *think* mind you, I may who the killer is...

Saggy Middles

As the ab-tastic Olympics wind down and one's WiP races to its Act I climax, a young man's thoughts turn naturally to the Great Saggy Middle.

You've got a great idea. You've got a slam-bang opening, and a slam-bang way to end your story. But somewhere between the first 50 pages and the last 50 pages, writers have a tendency to get lost. Plotting can get heavy and bog down. Characters get lost and wander aimlessly. That slam-bang finish might lay somewhere on the far side of this swamp, but will the story ever get there?

I think in part, the Great Saggy Middle is a difficulty with infatuation. A lot of folks think they have a book in them (usually way too autobiographical and way too derivative of their influences, but that's another story) and sit down one quiet night to FINALLY WRITE. They start in a big rush of emotion and excitement, because the start of a new book is emotional. And it's exciting.

More accurately, it's infatuating. And infatuation wears off. For most, that means a 50 or 100 page fragment in a drawer somewhere, never to be spoken of again. For those of us with more stubborn than sense, it means 'holding on when there is nothing in you, except the Will which says... "Hold on.!"'

It means we have to get through the Big Middle.

To that end, here are a few tricks I've cribbed from books and movies. As always here at Full Throttle Productions, take what you like and leave the rest...

1) Subplot Climax: To help cover that wide stretch between Act I and Act II, bring one or more subplots to a climax. The resolution of the Daniel Cleaver subplot in Bridget Jones is a good example, as is Jim Carrey's realization that he's a bad father in Liar Liar. Or Darth Vader putting a swift end to Han and Leiah's plans in Empire.

2) Tentpole Action: Putting a big, vivid, splashy bit of action or sex or excitement in the middle can provide a useful distraction. James Lee Burke often throws a colorful psycho or two at Dave Robicheaux right around the middle of the book, and many a pulp writer found a good reason for a fistfight to smooth the way through. The bar Shaft is in gets machine-gunned in the original (and still the baddest) version. The protagonist in High Fidelity has a sexual encounter that keeps his journey back through his exes from turning tedious, and in Ilsa leaves Rick as the Nazis conquer Paris in Casablanca.

(For those of you with more lowbrow tastes, y'ever notice the standard gratuitous sex scene happens just about halfway through every cheap 80's action movie? Just sayin'.)

Sometimes, these big splashes can form a mini-story of their own, complete with setup, complication, climax and denoument. Casablanca's a good example, as the trash-compactor scene in Star Wars.

3) Local Color: A variation on using action to distract, but with a vivid personality instead. Just trot somebody exciting or fun on stage, maybe have a joke or fun story.

My all-time favorite example of this is Mike Yanagita in FARGO. The guy's weird, random, funny, sad and creepy all at once. He practially steals the show, and he definitely distracts from the fact that Marge really doesn't do much in her time in the Twin Citites.

4) Multi-Act: Instead of trying to successfully navigate across three acts, your story may be better told in four, five, six or more acts. There are two ways to do this:

Set up a mess of subplots and set about resolving them. Quentin Tarentino does this in Kill Bill, as the Bride works her way down her laundry list of funeral-candidates. (Pulp Fiction *sort of* does this too, with seperate vignettes jumping back and forth in time, each supporting a theme of second chances, but Tarantino likes to get complicated with structure.) Four Weddings and a Funeral has five sets of relationships to resolve on its way to hooking up the sixth.

One goal, many discrete obstacles. In The Quick Red Fox, Travis Mcgee pursues his quest through something like five acts, each as important as the last. In Raiders of the Lost Ark, Indy does much the same thing. In pre-Daniel Craig days, the silver-screen James Bond often chased his villains all over the show.

In fact, the multi-act structure seems to work well with pursuit/quest stories. Anybody care to count the acts in Lord of the Rings?

For that matter, Shakespeare liked a five-act structure, too. His way of keeping the story from developing a Great Saggy Middle was to keep reversing the main plot. (Those kids won't get together. Wait, they might. No, they won't! Yes, they WILL! Oh wait, they're both dead.)

Anybody think of any I've missed?

And let's see... we're here at Day 16 of BURIED, and the Full-Throttle Daily-Wordcount-o-Meter stands at 17,100 words. This pleases me.

Next Steps

81,000 words

For your reading amusement, samples of six word short stories from various famous authors. Here, and here.

Is it just me, or did the genre scribblers over at Wired write a more generally entertaining batch than the more mainstream crowd at The Gaurdian. Maybe I was just won over by, "With bloody hands, I say goodbye." and "I'm dead. I've missed you. Kiss...?"

So I'm coming into Act 3, the endgame. The setting for the Big Final Showdown isn't at all where I'd pictured it, but it's too right to argue with. The bad guys are descending in their droves. The good guys sit placid and unaware. The hero who can save them all is off chasing a trail gone cold, never suspecting that she is among the hunted.

Or something.

At this point, I can see the big shape of where I'm headed but, as usual, not much of how I'm going to get there.

Fair enough, too. If I can't follow directions well enough to even follow an outline I write, I deserve what I get. Besides, I know I'll get there. I always do.

Several times back in the States, I hopped in the car with a vague destination and enough money for the gas, Mountain Dew and beef jerky to get me there. I moved to New Zealand with two suitcases and no idea where I was staying that night. This isn't all that different.

Right now, I have the scene I'm still writing, and know who's colliding with whom in the next scene (every scene is conflict, remember), and that's enough for right now.

71,000 words (not counting stuff taken out)

Still chuddling along, and happy as Larry. Except last night.

Last night, I had to un-kill a character. Now, I liked this character, and wasn't exactly thrilled to kill her in the first place. But I needed a strong 'beat' to end Act Two, and that was it.

I'm glad to have this character back, even if she can be a pain in the ass sometimes, but it meant unravelling some darned good writing. One of the better scenes in the book in fact.

Them's the breaks. And the truth is, the end of Act Two should be one of the stronger scenes in the book.

Why's she back? Did I need her later? No. It's that the three act structure shifted underfoot in the process of fixing up my altest Sudoku Moment. So out that tension point had to come, which left my character alive again.

For those who don't know, most modern fiction more or less runs in three acts. The Ancient Greeks used five, I think, as do some of my favorite operas, but most books, movies and TV use three. I think of them as The Setup, The Chase, and Endgame, and each one has its own beginning, middle and end, just like it was a mini-story all its own.

Big difference is that Acts One and Two, the climax needs to be *right* at the end, and of a nature to propel the audience into the next act with enthusiasm. Act Three, the climax comes a leeeetle way back, so that we have a couple of chapters, or a few minutes of film, to wind down a bit, decompress after all those (hopefully) strong emotions. In TV, this often involves the series characters sitting around the set and having a pointless, feel-good joke before the credits roll. That little nubbin at the end is the denouement.

In Predator, everything with the commandos being deployed, exploring the jungle, being stalked a little bit (not a lot, but a few creepy sounds and the sight of the soldiers seen through some sort of IR/UV thingy), right up to the hanging corpses of the missing troops is Act One.

The story at this point is all about framing the problem. Arnold on the field? Check. Something rotten in the South American jungle? Check. The climax is the sight of those corpses hanging like trophy kills. It's the boost the ratchets up the tension and carries us into Act Two, in which We Meet the Monster.

This is The Chase. Except instead of Holmes tracking the Hound, or Bridget Jones chasing true love with the wrong man when the right one's under her nose (the movie here -- the book used Jane Austen's original, more act-y structure, and I don't want to get into that), we've got a mysterious presence (still haven't seen the Predator yet) hunting and killing a group of elite commandos.

The commandos try to fight back. They do intelligent things, gradually figuring out (at gruesome loos of life) that their enemy has weapons and technology far beyond anything they're ready for. There's so much blood and gore in this act that the climax *isn't* more gore. It's Arnold looking at some yellow drippy bits on a leaf and delivering the line, "If it bleeds, we can kill it."

And Act Three eases the tension off a bit, as Arnold and the mysterious creature prepare for what both know will be their final battle. Even sugar-hyped twelve year olds know this is the Endgame.

And the third act should be a series of climaxes. The first good sight of that Rick James-looking motherfucker, Arnold screaming his defiant challenge, the tripwires failing, the heat-vision revelation, one hell of a big fight. One right after the other, building on top of each other until the audience is on the edge of their seats. Or hopefully, anyway.

Of course, Predator also has about the shortest denouement ever. Maybe ten seconds of film with Arnold and The Girl in a helicopter headed home. But we do need that little bit...