Jennifer Crusie's Blog, page 288

Site To See: Does the Dog Die?

I love io.9 because it tells me so many interesting things, but the most vital link it’s given me lately is to a much-needed movie review site called Does the Dog Die? which mostly consists of one or two line reviews like

Raiders of the Lost Ark: A capuchin monkey that the main characters treat as a pet is killed when it eats poisoned dates. Reggie the pet Burmese python is not harmed but a number of venomous wild snakes are set on fire.

See, that’s the kind of thing you need to know, although I’d have mentioned that the cute monkey was a Nazi spy. Also those snakes in the pit? I could spare them.

However, some times I think they’re too understated:

Old Yeller: Yes the dog dies. He’s shot by his owner after contracting rabies.

which I think shows a great deal of self-restraint on the part of the reviewer since I would have written

Old Yeller: Yes the dog dies; he’s shot by the kid who loves him after the dog contracts rabies saving said kid’s life and WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH YOU, WALT, I WAS SEVEN YEARS OLD AND THAT MOVIE HAUNTS ME TO THIS DAY, YOU MISERABLE, DOG-HATING SON OF A BITCH, I SINCERELY HOPE YOU’RE NOW IN A COLD, DARK PLACE WITHOUT ANY KIND OF FIERCELY LOYAL AND LOVING THING, FUCK THE AFTERLIFE FOR YOU, YOU HEARTLESS DALEK BASTARD.

Mostly, it’s just good to get the head’s up because of the number of screenwriters who kill the dog because they can’t seem to tug on the heartstrings any other way, not understanding that that’s not tugging on the heartstrings, that’s pouring kerosene over the heartstrings and then lighting a slow flame that will spread throughout the nervous system causing screaming pain that will last for FIFTY-SEVEN YEARS AND BEYOND, YOU SADISTIC DICKHEADS.

Also Cujo. Jesus.

Does the Dog Die?: Highly recommended.

The Old Broad in My Pajamas Gets Cake

Sixty-four years ago, something amazing happened: Me. Well, every birth is amazing, I don’t think there was anything special happening with mine in particular (my mother said she’d had worse stomach aches eating green apples which COMPLETELY prepared me for my own twenty-four hours of labor ending in an emergency caesarian twenty-five years later, but I digress) and then some stuff happened and BAM, now I’m sixty-four.

I find this difficult to believe until I remember that I saw the Beatles live on Ed Sullivan. Stuff I wore when I was in college is now vintage. I’m vintage. In one more year, I’ll be in the Last Demographic (you know, that box you check that says “65 and older”). I’ve never pretended to be younger than I am–what’s the point? nobody cares how old a novelist is–so it really shouldn’t matter, especially since I wake up every morning and it’s just me, same as ever. But then I look in the mirror and think, “Who is that old lady? And why is she wearing my pajamas?” (How she got into my pajamas, I’ll never know.) (Sorry, couldn’t resist.) “OH, SWEET JESUS, I’M OLD.” So this week, I’ve been thinking about what it means to grow Old. (Not older, everybody does that. OLD.)

Here’s the thing: You know all that crap they tell you about how your elderly years are the best time of your life? It’s true. I think it’s the result of surviving sixty-four years of trying different careers, battling different disasters, refraining from strangling different men, drinking an ocean of Diet Coke, and personally supporting the cacao fields of the Ivory Coast during times of stress. You build up some experience doing that. You establish a base line for disaster (“Am I dying of cancer? No? So not the worst day of my life. Carry on.”) You develop a good idea of your coping skills and when to put them to use. You start saying, “No” a lot more to the crap you don’t want to do and “Yes” to the guilty pleasures you no longer feel guilty about. You’ve spent sixty-four years sweating the small stuff, and now the small stuff is old enough to sweat on its own, so you can do other things. It’s peaceful. There are some real downsides (high blood pressure, diabetes, asthma, AMD, polycythemia vera, and boobs that aren’t as high as they used to be), but it’s a fair trade-off for all the things that age gives you (self-confidence, proportion, skill, treachery). On the whole, it’s a win.

In fact, it’s more than a win, it’s a relief. I remember feeling all this pressure when I was younger, to accomplish things, to get things, to hurry up because I had to get everything done before I got OLD. OLD was like that farm upstate your parents told you your dog had gone to when you came home from school and he wasn’t there. It’s okay, they told you. He’s chasing rabbits. But you knew there weren’t any rabbits. Except now I’m on that farm upstate (cottage upstate) and it turns out there are rabbits. And bears. And dachshunds and a poodle. It’s actually a great place to be. It’s such a relief to know that it’s okay to get Old. Nothing’s really changed; I couldn’t remember anything in my thirties, either. It’s still me. We’re good here. Like Tennyson’s Ulysses, I’m still on board for striving, seeking, finding, and it’ll be a cold day in hell when I yield, but I think the quote I want comes from that very wise man, Douglass Adams: “I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be.” Or if that’s too high falutin’ for you, there’s the inscription I’m going to have on my tombstone: “Nothing but good times ahead.”

So you youngsters out there, don’t worry about getting Old. When you get here, you’re going to love it. Also, thank you, Jo, for giving birth to me sixty-four years ago, even if you did mislead me with that green apples story, I forgive you. And now I must go find some cake because I don’t have to count calories any more. Thank God, I’m Old.

Next Who Sunday: Vincent and the Doctor, Richard Curtis

I picked Vincent and the Doctor next because it’s not about the Doctor, because it’s by Richard Curtis (Four Weddings and a Funeral, Notting Hill, Love Actually), and there’s an amazing Good Cry at the end, delivered by Bill Nighy, one of my AGIE actors (Always Good in Everything). Also, art.

Who Sunday: The Eleventh Hour, Steven Moffat

Moffat and Smith were faced with an awful task: Bring Who fans into a new season with a new Doctor. They hit the ground running, and Smith never stopped. Moffat got his feet tangled up in his mythology–you know that crack in Amy’s wall? you’re going to get damn tired of that crack–but even hobbled, he brings a new kind of insanity to the series. I’ll forgive him a lot for “Let’s Kill Hitler” alone, not to mention throwaway lines like “Blimey. Get a girlfriend, Jeff” and “Do I just have a face that nobody listens to? Again?” But not for Clara and stuff like “The universe is cracked, the Pandorica will open, silence will fall” which will take eons to pay off. Fortunately, the Doctor has eons.

Great example of how to burst a new character into an old show and throw in some new companions, too, while moving at warp speed so nobody has time to think, “I miss Ten.” First step: cast Matt Smith. Extra points: the creepy monster mom and her creepy monster daughters (please cast Olivia Coleman in everything, thank you).

Cherry Saturday: 9-14-2013

Today is National Cream-Filled Donut Day. Enacted into law by people who couldn’t spell “doughnut.”

Goal & Stakes

Lola had a good question on yesterday’s post, and since it’s one that doesn’t come up a lot, I wanted to spend a little time on it: the relationship between goal and stakes.

The protagonist and the antagonist in your scene/story need goals or they’ll have no reason to move. These goals do not have to match (“We both want the Ark of the Covenant!”) but they do have to cross, which is why you need a conflict box, to make sure their goals not only put them at cross purposes but also lock them into that conflict.

So now they’re locked in conflict, and things are going to get dicey. Why doesn’t one of them just quit?

Because the stakes/consequences are too high. If they quit, the Nazis win. If they quit, they’ll lose their houses. If they quit, their marriages die, their dogs run away, their jobs end, their children become only average, their cable TV goes out, whatever. It doesn’t matter what the stakes are in the same way that it doesn’t matter what the goal is. There are only two things that matter:

1. The character believes that the goal is crucial and the stakes are high.

2. The reader believes in the character.

So a good goal can be a cup of tea if the stakes are the future of a marriage, and if the reader sympathizes with the protagonist, wants her marriage to succeed, and believes that getting that cup of tea means the marriage will survive. If the reader doesn’t care about the protagonist, then it’s not going to work. That’s why the goal can be to defuse the bomb and the stakes to save the city, and the story will still be weak because the reader isn’t invested in the character and therefore doesn’t engage in the story world which means that the bomb is a paper bomb and the city is a paper city, and she doesn’t care about the protagonist enough to worry if he gets a paper cut.

So maybe a better way to look at this is Goal/Stakes/Consequences.

Petal’s goal is to save Colin.

At stake is Colin’s life as a human.

The consequences are that Colin is rescued or that he spends the rest of his probably much shorter life as a frog. (I checked and the normal life span of a frog, which varied greatly, is about fifteen years, and Colin’s already in his twenties, so . . .)

The problem with that is that the consequences are all for Colin, not Petal. If I do the same goal for Petal, it devolves into a negative goal, not wanting responsibility for Colin’s frog-ness, not wanting to feel guilt. And negative goals are death for protagonists.

So I can shift it to “Pet’s goal is to keep her secret.” But that’s another negative goal, to not telling her secret.

I think the goal has to be “Pet’s goal is to save Colin,” with the stakes being that if she doesn’t, Colin stays a frog and probably dies, and the ensuing investigation will certainly blow Pet’s secret, which will put her in danger of being murdered.

I think Pet would put rescuing Colin above keeping her secret, but the fact that her secret coming out would put her life in danger, and Colin not being rescued would almost certainly uncover that secret because of all the scrutiny she’d be under, means that although her “Save Colin” goal is not personal, what’s at stake makes it personal. She’d try to save Colin even if she didn’t have a secret to protect; the fact that she has a secret just raised the stakes and makes her motivation to get her goal stronger.

Is that clear or just more confusing?

[More on stakes from Chuck Wendig.]

“The Frog Principal” 5: Fixing the Mess

Okay, so clearly I got so far up my own nose on this scene rewrite that I damaged my brain: this needs simplified, clarified, and above all focused. So definitely the conflict box again and a beats analysis, but also a better look at the characters.

I read that Russell T. Davies scripts never used more than three adjectives to describe his characters in his teleplays, two lines to describe his settings. So Pet is smart, cautious, and lonely. Wy is instinctive, suspicious, and aggressive. Geoffrey is kind, curious, and arrogant. Felix is cheerful, hardworking, and naive. I can move outside those words as I write, but that’s the general impression that readers should get.

But then I realized, I’d already described Wy in a later scene, when Petal is trying to explain him to Mirra:

“I think what you see when you look at Wyland is what Wyland is. He heads straight for things. He has all this energy, it’s like controlled fury, and he heads straight for a problem and then just bangs at it until something breaks. I don’t think he’s capable of duplicity, he’s just so . . . there, every moment, all the time. Frankly, I don’t know how he sleeps.”

So Pet’s protecting a secret and Wy is going on the attack until he gets an answer:

Another way to analyze is a steal from the Pixar Poster (click to enlarge):

That’s my scene and I’m sticking to it. So now all I have to do is break it down into beats, Pet vs. Wy:

Beat One: Pet calls the EMTs, gets Wy, too, tries to be helpful until Wy’s questions get to close to her secret. So the stakes move from saving Colin to saving Colin and keeping her secret. TP: Pet asks them to leave.

Beat Two: Pet tries to get them to leave and take Colin with them, but that makes Wy more suspicious, pressing her until she makes a mistake. The stakes move from saving Colin/keeping her secret to saving Colin/keeping her secret/getting rid of Wy as soon as possible. TP: Colin’s gone.

Beat Three: Wy tells the EMTs to take the frog and go, but it’s disappeared. Pet suggests they all leave, but the EMTs start looking for the frog, and Wy tells her she should take him inside the house to talk since she’s in a royal mess, which tells her he knows her secret. The stakes rise to their highest point and Pet loses: Wy knows her secret and Colin’s not only a frog but missing.

Then take my new rough draft, break it into one document per beat, get all the set-up stuff into the first beat so nothing disrupts the tension in the second and third beats, make sure each beat gets shorter and escalates, fix all the minor stuff the betas found, and try to get my voice back. Then fix the next scene . . .

Clearly this is not going to be the last draft of this scene.

I’m going to try to get the next rewrite up tomorrow. Argh.

Princeton Romance Symposium

I’m finally getting out of the house and back into speaking mode. Okay, one speaking engagement: one of the keynotes and a panel on gender in romance at the Princeton Popular Romance Author Symposium on Oct 24 at 5:30. Travel is now dicey for me but the wonderful people at Princeton are sending a car so I can do this:

I’m keynoting the first night and appearing on a panel in Betts Hall with people I really like so probably no snarling, and that’s all free, but you have to register. The papers are presented the next day, Oct. 25, and for that you have to pay twenty bucks, but it will be well worth it; Princeton has been very open and supportive of romance scholarship, so they tend to attract very good papers.

Just wanted to let you know I’m leaving the house at the end of October. Krissie is dogsitting so the dogs are delirious with joy, and I get to talk about gender and the romance industry. Happiness abounds.

Also, last draft of “The Frog Principal” first scene tomorrow. This week turned into a dental nightmare.

Writing on the Wall

I’m not a fan of posters that tell you what to do (“Live! Love! Dance!”) but I agree with everything on this poster, things tweeted by story board artist, Emma Coats, when she worked at Pixar. Available as free downloadable jpg or order the poster on Etsy:

And a big thank you to Sue Danic for giving me the URL.

Next Who Sunday: The Eleventh Hour, Steven Moffat

The first time I saw this, I was still bitter about losing Ten, so I didn’t give it the fair shot it deserved. It’s by the best Who episode writer of all time, Steven Moffat (“The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances,” “The Girl in the Fireplace,” “Blink,” “Silence in the Library/The Forest of the Dead”), but it also starts his tenure as showrunner, about which I am less enthusiastic. But I have weeks to be grumpy about that; this week I’m just loving Matt Smith making his smashing entrance as Eleven, doing his usual stellar job of acting with a child, who is also stellar. Since Eleven is demented but enthusiastic (how this happened, I do not know, since Ten was sane but morose), the entire episode is demented but enthusiastic and also funny as hell, even with a really creepy antagonist or maybe because of it. Also Amy and Rory debut. And the Tardis has a library and a swimming pool.

I really love this episode.