Jennifer Crusie's Blog, page 268

Leverage Sunday: “The Rashomon Job:” Structure

I was going to write on POV and community for this episode, and I will, later this week, but watching it again (for probably the twentieth time, it’s one of my favorite episode), I was struck by how well they pulled off two difficult structures: the frame structure and the patterned structure.

So let’s start with definitions.

A frame narrative is one in which the action story is bracketed by scenes of someone telling the tale. Charles Marlow, in Heart of Darkness, is sitting on the deck of a ship at the mouth of the Thames, telling his companions about a trip he took up the Congo to find a madman named Kurtz. All of the action is in the tale he tells which makes up the majority of the story, but all of the meaning is in the frame, the conclusions he draws from the story now that it’s over and he’s looking back on it. In the same way, Louis in Interview with the Vampire is in a dark hotel room telling a journalist how he became a vampire and the travails he’s gone through since; Louis’s life story is full of action and drama, but the meaning of the story is in the quiet, static frame, Louis sitting and talking about his experiences. Without the frame, the action in the middle is just an adventure story with no meaning; without the adventure in the middle, the frame is static and flat with nothing to illustrate its themes. The framed story is notoriously difficult to pull off or it will feel like two boring bookends with a flashback in the middle; the key is to structure it so that the middle doesn’t feel like a flashback, that you have, in essence, two sets of Now.

A patterned structure is even harder to do. Instead of chronological acts, a story moving forward in a sequence, a patterned structure is made up of in dependent but related parts that when taken together make a pattern; by themselves, the parts each have one meaning, but taken together, they have an entirely new meaning. The best analogy is a patchwork quilt, each block is a design in itself, but when combined with other blocks becomes an entirely different design. Margaret Atwood’s “Rape Fantasies” is the best example I’ve found: A woman narrator talks about her co-workers’ discussion of rape fantasies, and then tells four of her own rape fantasies, each different, but each ending the same way as she manages to disarm her would-be rapist with emotion that leads them into a relationship. At the end, the reader discovers that she’s been talking to somebody in a bar, someone she’s attracted to, which changes the stories from individual comic vignettes into a deep insight into a frightened character. The danger with patterned stories, of course, is that they’ll just seem random, that the pattern won’t be established well enough to make the meaning clear.

Which brings us to “The Rashomon Job.”

“The Rashomon Job” begins at home, in the bar, the place the team feels most comfortable next to Nate’s apt. They’re watching a TV news program about the golden Dagger of Aqu’abi. This is the beginning of the frame, the static bookends that establishes the central conflict: years ago when they were solo criminals (Nate was an insurance investigator then), they each stole the dagger. This static frame–sitting and talking–launches the first four pieces of the patterned narrative, as each of them tells the action story of how he or she stole the dagger.

The structure here is amazing: the four of them tell the same story with many of the same events, and yet nothing repeats. Instead, the stories form layers, each one adding not only more detail but another color to the story. Sophie the diva is the center of attention, the elegant queen of the museum and queen of the grifters, until Eliot tells the story and she’s a flirt, Hardison tells the story and she’s a shrill buttinsky, and Parker tells the story and she’s an incomprehensible madwoman. The key is that although all four are played for laughs, all four of those interpretations are Sophie, and putting them all side by side makes a pattern that shows the complex and maddening character that Sophie really is. Each character gets one less layer until the last, Parker, which is fitting because Parker really doesn’t have layers yet (she’s getting there). The fifth story is from Nate, as the insurance investigator on the scene, the guy who really does end up with the dagger and who then turns the story in an entirely new direction.

Like all frame stories, the center action narratives would be fun to watch on their own, but the deeper meaning is in the frame: They all lost the dagger because they were working alone and therefore couldn’t see the big picture, the picture Nate always sees. If they’d been a team back then, they’d have had the dagger. So the last frame scene is them turning to the TV to hear the British CEO who now owns the dagger (and who is remarkably reminiscent of the jerk from BP who explained to America that the Gulf of Mexico was really not that much water when you compared it to the rest of the planet) talking about “the little people” which inspires them all to go steal the dagger again, this time as a team. At the end of the frame, they leave the bar as a team on a mission, united once more.

My first thought when I considered this episode for this series of posts on community was that it wouldn’t work. It was fun, one of the best hours of TV I’ve ever seen, but it was really more fan service than community building; if you’ve watched the first two and a half seasons of this show, this episode is like a box of chocolates, each piece better than the last. But after taking it apart, I realized that this is one of the most community-focused stories that the series tells because it shows each one failing as a loner, something they clearly accept at the end as they band together once again to take down the bad guy.

It’s also a great example of POV in story-telling, but later for that.

Cherry Saturday: May 31, 2014

Today is National Macaroon Day, not to be confused with The Prettiest-Cookie-Ever Day:

New Goal: Focus

I have a focus problem.



The Things app costs way too much money but, along with the Brene Brown course, is changing my life for the better, so maybe it doesn’t cost too much money. No, it really does. What it does do is organize my life for me, something I am regrettably bad at doing. I’m talking the basics: I have daily reminders in there to take my meds, eat an apple, do the dishes, all the things I’ll wander off and forget. Because I am unfocused.

Take the writing book. I really want to write it, but there’s so much other stuff to do that it’s still in pieces. So I thought, maybe a writing blog. I know, this is often a writing blog, but I need to make some extra cash here while I’m finishing a book, and it’ll be a cold day in hell when I put advertising on Argh. But if I did a formal writing blog, one short post on writing every day, I could do all the different things I wanted to do in the book, make it free to everybody (that’s important, writers don’t have a lot of money), and put advertising on that since it’s not a community. Then I think, maybe not, maybe I should do a series of really short writing books and charge $2.99 for each (that’s affordable, right?), and together they’d make a big book. Then I thought about making brownies. Focus: it’s a problem.

Or take Liz. I have rewritten that first scene a million times, but they’ve all been tweaks. Then last night I thought, “I’m doing this wrong,” and started to rewrite the scene from scratch in my head. That book needs more emotional investment, and I’m wondering if it isn’t because I’m writing in first person which is too personal for me, so I pull back and the protagonist (Liz) becomes remote. On the other hand, I really like her voice. Well, I would, it’s mine. But what I really need to do is FINISH THE DAMN BOOK. Focus, I needs it.

Then there’s the kitchen. I need to paint the walls, hang the small cabinets I bought, and build the shelves and counter for the other side. I’m doing a lot of cooking these days, which is good, but there’s no room since the kitchen is still a construction site (and was only 9′ x 9′ to begin with). Plus I keep thinking that if I get hit by a truck and people come in the cottage, they’re going to be appalled with the level of chaos, dirt, and Stuff that’s in here. That’s okay if I’m dead, but if I’m just hospitalized, that’s going to be humiliating. I tried to get started on the painting yesterday, but while I was looking for the paint, I got distracted and ended up re-reading Thief of Time again instead. FOCUS, damn it.

I did manage to get the dogs washed, so that’s something. Must remember to call the vet for flea meds. That stuff is expensive. Plus they need their shots, so maybe I can take two of them at a time. Mona climbed up on the pillows this morning and slipped down between them and the headboard; I pulled her out when I heard her whining and she climbed right back up again. Focus, Mona, that is not a good place for you.

The red blotch from the spider bite on my arm is not going away. Maybe that’s what’s going to get me instead of the truck. Must remember to call for a doctor’s appointment. No, first I have to call fucking Blue Cross AGAIN. I hate Blue Cross. Also, all the politicians who killed the single payer system, I hate all of you guys. Also the Koch brothers. And Fox News. Wait, what was I talking about? Damn it.

I have to go to the grocery. Applesauce, northern beans, garlic, bread, the basics. And the laundromat. I was thinking that eventually I’d put in a washer and dryer here, but there’s something about going to the laundromat that’s starting to appeal to me. For one thing, that and the grocery are about the only things that get me out of the cottage. Not that I want to leave the cottage. This is a great cottage. I really should go down to the lake, though, and see what I can do about making the path more accessible. Cement block? Yeah, like I’m going to carry cement blocks down that hill. Ha. Maybe build some steps? Wood gets really slippery under trees, though, so I’d have to add some non-slip strips. Maybe tomorrow if it stops raining . . .

Where was I?

Focus. In my quest to improve my life, it’s the next thing I’m going to focus on.

Dog Day Afternoon in Hell

Four dogs. A Martha Stewart dog bathtub in the shower. An hour in hell.

For those of you who were asking for a dog post, yesterday was Bath Day.

Which was followed by four dogs, jumping on the bed to get dry . . .

Which was followed by a lot of resentment . . .

Still they got new collars and a lot of dog cookies, and today they’ve forgotten it all. Unmemorial Day. We spent the morning in bed while I finished reading Connie Willis’s To Say Nothing of the Dog, which seemed fitting and which was excellent.

How’s your Memorial Day Weekend been?

May 25: Wear the Lilac Towel Day

May 25th, as all fans of Douglass Adams should know, is Towel Day, the day to flaunt your towel in memory of an amazing author. From Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy:

A towel, it says, is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have. Partly it has great practical value. You can wrap it around you for warmth as you bound across the cold moons of Jaglan Beta; you can lie on it on the brilliant marble-sanded beaches of Santraginus V, inhaling the heady sea vapors; you can sleep under it beneath the stars which shine so redly on the desert world of Kakrafoon; use it to sail a miniraft down the slow heavy River Moth; wet it for use in hand-to-hand-combat; wrap it round your head to ward off noxious fumes or avoid the gaze of the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal (such a mind-bogglingly stupid animal, it assumes that if you can’t see it, it can’t see you); you can wave your towel in emergencies as a distress signal, and of course dry yourself off with it if it still seems to be clean enough.

Adams’ excellent advice about panic (don’t) and the answer to the ultimate meaning of life (42) is second (and third) in importance only to knowing where your towel is at all times. He also understood deadlines:

But mostly I like his approach to life:

and

But that’s not all! May 25th is also, as any fan of Terry Pratchett should know, Wear the Lilac Day. From Wikipedia:

The 25th of May is quietly celebrated by the survivors of the People’s Revolution, which ended the reign of Lord Winder. They wear a sprig of lilac and gather at the Small Gods Cemetery to honour the Watchmen who fell: Cecil Clapman, Ned Coates, Dai Dickins, John Keel, Horace Nancyball, Billy Wiglet, and (albeit temporarily) Reg Shoe. . . . The slogan of the People’s Revolution is “Truth, Justice, Freedom, Reasonably Priced Love, and a Hard-Boiled Egg!”

Pratchett is insanely quotable and even more insanely readable . . .

And I especially like his approach to drafting . . .

And his approach to aging . . .

After Pratchett’s diagnosis of Alzheimer’s, Wear the Lilac Day is now used to raise awareness and funding for Alzheimer’s research.

Because of this, today is the day that Argh Nation Wears the Lilac Towel in honor of two great authors who have brought immense pleasure and truly weird characters into our world. We shall never forget (although we may be a little absent-minded at times and are easily distracted).

Cherry Saturday: May 24, 2014

Today is National Escargot Day. Come out of your shells and roll in garlic and butter.

If You’re Afraid, You’ll Have to Overlook It . . .

Lani e-mailed me yesterday and said that Alastair was suffering because he was living with three females. I said, “He knew the job was dangerous when he took it.” Which made me think of Super Chicken, which took me to You Tube where I found all seventeen episodes. (I think. I didn’t actually count them.) They’re each about six and a half minutes counting the excellent theme song:

When you find yourself in danger,

When you’re threatened by a stranger,

When it looks like you will take a lickin’,

There is someone waiting

Who will hurry up and rescue you

Just caaaaall for Super Chicken!

Fred, if you’re afraid, you’ll have to overlook it.

Besides you knew the job was dangerous when you took it.

He will drink his super sauce

And throw the bad guys for a loss,

And he will bring them in alive and kickin’

There is one thing you should learn

When there is no one else to turn to

Caaaaall for Super Chicken!

Caaaaall for Super Chicken!!

It’s that bit in the middle about SC’s sidekick Fred that I’ve found most useful. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve looked at a disaster I helped create and thought, “You knew the job was dangerous when you took it, Fred.” Calms me down every time. It’s especially good, I find, for writer’s block.

For those new to the glory that is Super Chicken, I suggest One of Our States is Missing if only for the Rhode Island jokes. The Big Bad in that one is Appian Way, one of the “Ways of Providence.” That’s right up there with the island that Merlin Brando lives on: Isle of Lucy (say it fast). Or Super Chicken’s airline of choice: Receding Airlines. Genius, every episode is genius.

I have much too much to do to watch Super Chicken cartoons. On the other hand, any day is improved by “The Wild Hair,” the story of Frankenstein’s toupee (okay, not Frankenstein, Dr. Could Be): “And the mad scientist found himself trapped in an ominous writhing mass of angry hair.” Genius, I tell you.

I know you don’t have time for Super Chicken, but really . . . make time for Super Chicken.

Leverage Sunday: The Inside Job: Integrating Back Story

So remember Leverage Sundays? Yes, I finally found the third season disks, got the DVD player hooked up again, and finished the laundry. You don’t want to know about the laundry. Okay, 14 dryers full at the laundromat. The big dryers. Note to self: do laundry more than twice a year. Where were we? Right. Leverage Sundays. Pretend it’s Sunday. I have to put up a different post this Sunday anyway because it’s an international holiday (two international holidays) so you’re getting Leverage-Today-Is-Sunday-Because-I-Said-So.

So . . .

Leverage’s Season Three turned in a different direction: Nate’s in jail, the team has bonded in his absence, and now they’re determined to break Nate out and get things rolling again. But Nate refuses, saying he’s broken the law and he’ll serve his time. Then a mysterious Italian woman shows up and promises Nate his freedom if he’ll agree to go after arch criminal Damian Moreau; if he refuses, she’ll have him deported to rot in an Italian prison and she’ll have his team killed. This would be a lot more effective if the actress giving the threat wasn’t the worst actor I’ve ever seen on network TV, but she doesn’t have a lot of onscreen time and it’s Leverage, so roll with it.

In “The Jailhouse Job,” Nate defeats a corrupt prison owner and his goon guards, after which the Mysterious But Terrible Italian Actress gets him a get-out-of-prison-free card that can be revoked at any time if he doesn’t go after Moreau, and we’re back in business.

That’s followed by “The Reunion Job,” which is fun, but creaks in places, although it’s worth it just to see Tim Hutton in socks and flip flops playing a pool guy; the real story arc here is that the team is back and settling into their old roles with one important change: Sophie’s been in charge while Nate’s been gone, and he’s come home to a family who sees him as one of the gang now, not the Fearless Leader. They’ll still follow him, but they’re gonna ask some questions. This episode also teases both the Sophie/Nate romance and the Parker/Hardison romance, but they’re going to draw both of those out for so long that the Sophie/Nate tango becomes more of a drag, so I’ll wait until they actually do something interesting with romance-within-community to talk about that.

Then comes “The Inside Job” and the first of Season Three’s back-story-heavy plots.

One of the drawbacks to writing a community story is that there are so many people that the focus gets diffused: everybody gets a little bit of time but nobody gets real development. Leverage worked around this by emphasizing different characters in their episodes so that by the end of the series, all five had achieved significant character growth. Parker, however, is the character whose arc is the most fun to follow because she changes from a character who is a disconnected id into a fully functioning human being with strong emotional ties to others. In fact, by the end of the last episode, Parker has changed from a feral child to the spokesperson of the Leverage organization. So at the midpoint in the third of five seasons, Parker gets “The Inside Job” to show how much she’s integrated, not only into the team, but to the world in general. She’s still nuts, but she’s much better at faking sane.

So let’s talk about back story for a minute. Back story is anything that happens before the first page/frame of a story. The vast majority of it lies beneath surface, never to appear on the page, or at least it does if you’re doing it right. As authors we know all of the back story, every little thing that ever happened to our characters, and we really really really want to tell the reader all of that because it’s so interesting. Meanwhile, the reader just wants the damn story. The best advice I can give on writing back story is to not write back story; just write the story in the now, hand it to a beta reader, ask her what she doesn’t understand, and figure out a way to get that into the now of the action. If you have a scene where your character stares out a window and thinks about her life, cut it. If you have a scene where your character and another character chat about the past (no conflict), cut it. If your character finds a diary or a letter that explains something from the past, for the love of god, cut that, shred it into ribbons and then bury it in the backyard. (No reader every said, “Wow, that letter was really exciting.” Especially if it’s in French; I’m looking at you, Dorothy Sayers.)

But you have back story and it’s really important so how are you going to get it on the page? Figure out why it’s important now, why that part of her history has come back to haunt her now, why some character from her past has come back to screw up her life now, and then tell the story of what’s happening now.

In Parker’s case, her old mentor is in trouble, she rushes in to save him, and he calls the team to help her when she gets in over her head. While the team works furiously to get her out and then goes in to bring down the Big Bad, Parker’s back story emerges almost entirely in the now of the story as the viewer meets Archie and sees his relationship with her in action. Even more telling is the conflict between her former surrogate father and her present surrogate father, as Archie and Nate square off, arguing about how to rescue her. They’re both criminals with shaky moral boundaries and even shakier attachment issues, but they both love Parker like a daughter, and they’ll do anything to save her. Their differences stem from the fact that Archie knows Parker as the emotionally distant and stunted child he trained, and Nate knows Parker as the skilled woman who’s part of his family, and their two views of her combine to make a vivid dimensional portrait of a fascinating woman.

Meanwhile Parker is loyal to both fathers, working with one to save the other while she deals with an AI security system, Eliot yelling at her through a window, and a sociopathic businesswoman who intends to shoot her. Parker’s passionate need to save Archie even if it means her own death tells us all we need to know about how much he really did save her. Her understanding of why he never took her home illuminates why she doesn’t connect, and her walk away from Archie with Nate at the end brings home that she’s not alone any more, she has family and connections and everything she was cheated out of as a child. The episode is fast-paced, full of action, a great caper story, and it shows Parker’s character arc without ever being about Parker’s character arc. Almost every bit of her history is illustrated in the action in the now, so it never slows down the story.

Season Three goes on to showcase the rest of the team, too. The next episode, “The Scherazade Job” gives us more of Hardison’s foster home upbringing, “The Boost Job” sketches in Parker’s history as a car thief before she met Archie, “The Three Card Monte Job” brings Nate’s father in as the antagonist and pretty much shows everything we needed to know about why Nate’s such a bastard, “The King George Job” takes the team to England where Sophie’s past catches up to her, and “The San Lorenzo Job” brings to light things about Eliot’s past he would prefer stay buried. So Season Three is about the individuals who make up the team, not just where they came from but why it’s such a freaking miracle that they’ve found each other.

There’s so much about this series that is brilliant–the twisty plots, the distinct characterizations, the zippy sense of fun and the equally zippy sense of peril–but the crucial thing is how careful the show runners are to build and test and rebuild the Leverage team through their character growth. Showing through the now of the story how broken and lost they all were before they met not only reinforces how important the community is to them, it deepens our investment in the team as a whole. We need them to be together because in this season, they’re not just a fun bunch of thieves and grifters, they’re family, and we’re a vicarious part of that.

Next, one of my all time favorite TV episodes in any series, “The Rashomon Job.”

Cherry Saturday: May 17, 2014

March is National Hamburger Month. It’s also National Salad Month. Pick a lane, people.

Cherry Saturday: May 10, 2014

Today is Clean Up Your Room Day. (Tragically, tomorrow is Eat What You Want Day. Missed it by THAT much.)