No Stone Left Unturned

RE-WRITING — WHAT WE REALLY DO!

It is not enough to do your best; you must know what to do, and THEN do your best. -W. Edwards Deming

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BURIED ORDNANCE

Once the basics are in place … premise, character, setting, and roughed-out events … the task now for the writer is fixing, reworking, and cleaning up the mess — that is, tossing out the garbage, adding new (and better) material, and polishing every element that makes its way into the final draft.

Among wannabe writers of his time, Ernest Hemingway was famous for claiming to rewrite every paragraph at least 50 times before releasing anything for public consumption. This might be overkill in an age of spell-checkers and other digital tools, but it does serve to illustrate the point — everything we write can benefit from rewriting … or said the way it really comes to mind … nothing written is ever perfect from beginning to end as it spews out from the writer’s fingertips.

But that is easier said than done, because rewriting is more like walking through a minefield of possible screw-ups than a certain process. Trying to fix a creative work can just as easily ruin it. So inasmuch as how I don’t normally define anything by “what it is not” — perhaps the best way to describe this rewriting process is to point out the more common buried ordinance along the pathway for success.

I’ll address these in the order that they afflict my own writing…

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REAL-TIME EDITING

As I write something for the first time, I have noticed how the creative process very often excludes the objectivity needed to see mistakes along the way. As I type right now, for instance, I am taking my best shot at saying what I want to say — but not until I switch into detail-editing-mode can I see how this is okay or not.

With practice, though, I have gotten better at real-time editing. I can now detect excessive repetition, and my internal sense of rhythm and pacing keeps me from piling too much in one place.

My spelling is terrible, and I am all thumbs on the keyboard — but that is no reason to stop when I’m on a roll. Only the worst of what I write gets hacked out immediately. The rest of the drivel is processed after I’ve written several paragraphs. That’s when I take a more objective look at the details. But I don’t stop after every word or phrase to edit what I’ve just said. Too much of a stop-and-go writing style like that only serves to crash my concentration –which is pointless– given how I can fix anything later.

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EDITING IN DETAIL

Detail editing involves removing repetition and replacing words and phrases with better terms and expressions. I will also remove points developed here that have already been developed better elsewhere.  Sometimes I rearrange the order of sentences, paragraphs, and whole sections if needed.

Personally, though, I have a hard time objectively editing my own work. Printing it out can help, but I would rather edit on-screen. So one of my favorite approaches is to publish my rough drafts on a website somewhere and then read it on-line with a browser. Somehow this distance allows me to see it as though reading someone else’s material.

Another useful trick I play on myself is to make promises about when I will deliver this material to someone else for comments and feedback. This self-imposed deadline seems to kick in a different way of looking, since now I am on the hook to actually show this to someone else (in fact, this is my motivation for publishing anything — since without a critical audience I might not work so hard to make my points.)

My other main trick is to leave the material lying fallow for a few days before I plan to read it for the last time. That way I can not remember exactly how I said everything, and perhaps notice mistakes that “weren’t there before!”

Of course, I’m only talking here about editing an essay — but editing anything uses the same basic process of taking an objective look at how things can be made better.

If in doubt chop it out, because a good idea is always easier to see in fewer words.

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RE-WRITING TRIPWIRES

Ham-handed editing is one of the more popular ways to mangle a story. But not the only way. Sometimes we are too conservative. Sometimes too witty. Often we write something that makes perfect sense to us — but it makes no sense to anyone else. The minefield is littered with all sorts of potential disasters like this — any one of which can ruin a good story.

Here are several notorious tripwires in the rewriting minefield that I have discovered…

Sacred Cows

Many writers get started by jotting down a powerful scene or sequence of cool dialogue — and the rest of the story gets written around this. But unless this sacred cow supports the goal of proving the premise, it will drag the whole story down. As a personal aside on the this point, what I am writing today actually started when I jotted down a diatribe blasted out of nowhere. But once I got down to making my case, I realized how those notes did nothing to support any points I had planned to make — so this space is now filled with something else.

The sacred cow becomes a bigger problem when the writer keeps running with it before there is a point in mind, and once it achieves a certain central location, the writer can no longer imagine the story without it. Perhaps after a few of these great scenes it may even look like the writer has is a winner here … until the sticky glue gets applied to hold all those disjointed pieces together, and the so-called “story” turns into a gooey mess that nobody can fix.

By “the glue” I refer to those trite and quite unbelievable contrivances we see in many bad films … the totally implausible subplots and lousy dialog that only exist to hold the monster together as it writhes through the projection machine, or across the pages of a book, or through the course of some terrible computer game. This is the glue — placed there there to support the sacred scenes. And it is a miserable experience to behold for all.

This is not to say that writing loose scenes is a bad idea early on. I write a lot of drivel in search of new ideas — but once I know what I want to say, I set anything aside that does not help, and start from scratch. Anything that’s worth keeping will leak back in, and the rest will not be worth saving.

Once you know what you want to say, toss out the sacred cows and rewrite everything from scratch with the premise centrally in mind. Amazingly, most sacred cows won’t hold a candle to the newer material.

High-Concept

High concept places a quirky idea in the role of the premise, and this almost always takes on the form of a “what if…” statement like… “What if suddenly there were no gravity?” or “What if there were a volcano in downtown Los Angeles?” Many situational comedies are high-concept in nature by creating unusual (and highly unlikely) scenarios among people… “What if a communist and a right-wing fascist were roommates?” There is nothing wrong with this per se, but the problem comes in the need for proving the premise – which takes a back seat to the central gag of the show.

The high concept is not a point — yet it takes on the role of the premise as though it were the point. One person is a communist, the other a fascist, and there isn’t much that can change without ruining the gag. It is a fixed situation that can not be challenged. And only minor and more subservient points can be made.

There are rare examples of high-concept stories that can be used to prove a premise. Men in Black is very much high-concept in nature … “What if the tabloids were true?” But this story works because of how the concept is retooled as a premise — the tabloids are true, and what you read really does happen, and rather than taking this for granted, the whole structure of the movie drives to a conclusion that proves this point.

A high-concept production that has not been converted into a premise will fail to prove anything beyond showing how many ways this situation creates a confusing mess in the lives of the characters. This may be all the audience wants – a good laugh at the expense of the tormented characters. But it could be much more satisfying as a story and still deliver the laughs.

It is much easier to start with a premise, then pull in cool what-if ideas to help prove it, than to start with a what-if and shoehorn a premise into this scenario.

Melodrama

Melodrama happens when every character is a stereotype with no particular reason for being who they are or doing what they are doing. The characters overplay their rolls trying to fill the void created by a lack of definition, and their excessive presence dominates the experience of the audience. Soap Operas are melodramas. Everything happens in endless overt detail. Everyone overreaches and overreacts. Nothing is left to the imagination. Everything pumped up way beyond larger-than-life. The patient has cancer, a bad heart, liver trouble, bankruptcy, girlfriend problems, a twin brother found dead in jail, and a contract on his life — all at the same time.

Melodramas are charades that masquerade as stories. There is no premise, there isn’t even any real attempt at establishing a clear fixing dilemma. The whole point is to go beyond plausibility and to make impossible characters face impossible situations.

Under very narrow circumstances, some melodramatic methods can be made to work. A farce, for example, is a melodramatic device used to illustrate a point through huge exaggerations. But this sort of overplaying should happen sparingly, and should always focus on proving a premise.

Anticlimax

Anticlimax happens when the temperature of the story peaks too early. The audience will look for more, and when nothing else measures up, they’ll start to ignore pretty much everything after this early peak. I once had a great moment midway through a screenplay where the protagonist escapes doom in a most dramatic fashion. But the scene was so powerful that it killed the rest of the movie. And only after I changed the scene could the story continue with any interest — by leaving it unclear as to whether the protagonist escapes or not.

If you have a scene that genuinely proves the premise in a convincing and fitting way, and it is the strongest scene in the story — then it either needs to be set at the highest peak of the concluding sequence of scenes, or else it needs to be trimmed back so that it does not overshadow the rest of the story.

Another anticlimax can happen when too much is put into an epilogue. The audience may begin to suspect that the story isn’t really quite over — like maybe a surprise ending is just around the corner — and when nothing much more happens the extended epilogue can drain away whatever good feelings the audience had about the real climax of the story. The last part of the Lord of Rings series of books does that, where the heroes return home to mop up a situation left over from the main events.

Stick to the basic temperature curve and you will avoid most problems with anticlimactic scenes.

Explaining

Stories should never stop to tell the audience what is happening (except perhaps as a comic gag). Everything worth knowing should already have been pre-planted. For example, in James Cameron’s movie Titanic, there is an early scene where we learn about the technicalities of how the ship sinks from a modern perspective. Later, when we see this actually happening in the past, there is no need to freeze-frame while somebody explains how the ship breaks in half. The story just keeps on rolling because we already know how this works.

If anything needs to be explained — do it very early. And if the explanation is taking too long, either simplify it or see if you can leave it out altogether. Audiences are always smarter and more insightful than we imaging and sometimes we need to have faith in their ability to dig into their own experience. It’s also a possibility they won’t even care to know all the technicalities. For example, is it really necessary for George Lucas to tell us in Star Wars: Episode1 exactly how “The Force” actually works? …or show us the cute-looking kid who someday turns into the big bad Darth Vader? Good grief!! Give it a rest.

If you must introduce a new concept or technical point, for the sake of your audience keep it simple and only explain what really needs to be made clear — and then do it early enough so that it doesn’t stink up the action once things begin to heat up.

Dialogue Versus Action

What happens in a story is far more more important than what the characters say about it. This is not to imply that characters should not speak. I simply mean that the writer must show what happens, and what happens needs to be more than characters sitting around talking about what they want to do, or what they think about some other character. Dialogue is only convincing in the context of the action. Han Solo’s pithy remarks reveal his bravado when he’s in the heat of battle — but they would drop dead on the floor if nothing much were happening.

Dialogue is no substitute for what the characters decide, when they act, and how they react to success and failure. Good dialogue confirms and punctuates what we already sense about the characters. It colors their personalities and rounds out the edges of who they are. Good dialogue helps us see the characters using words to describe how we already see them in every other way.Dialogue can also be used to plant details for later use — sparingly — or quickly dispose of secondary elements threatening to overshadow the rest of the story.

Yet keep in mind how the audience is not a jury weighing every word they hear – in fact most audiences miss a fairly large portion od what is being said – even when written on a printed page (do you really remember what I said about sacred cows?).

Unless you’re telling a story like My Dinner With Andre — never tell it through dialogue as the main vehicle since — at best — this will leave most members of the audience thoroughly exhausted.

Stage plays (which are mostly dialogue) get around this problem by having the actors tell each other stories (for the most part), and in so doing their dialogue contains a measure of information about the actions of others. But in movies –and particularly in computer games– this will not work, because on-screen –where anything can happen– actions will always speak louder than words.

Incestuous Writing

I have always become nauseous to hear music played about musicians, paintings painted about painters, or stories written about writers. And I get more than a little nervous when a computer game makes a game-playing “hacker” the hero as well. That’s what I call incestuous writing – and for me feels like some too stuck in their own world to write outside the art form itself.

Of course I tread close to this self-imposed taboo by writing this series. But I will never do it in a story. I’ll never write a story about the life of a person writing a story — unless it is someone whose life is unique and interesting in some other important way like the struggles of Virginia Woolf, where she happens to be a writer and there’s no avoiding the connection.

If all of your ideas revolve around sitting at a keyboard — then the time has come for you to see the real world. And when you return from your real-life adventure you will have something new to say.

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Next Time: Can a Great Story be told in a Game?

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