S.J. Forester's Blog

Protagonists

The next article in my writing series is up on Radish. This one covers protagonists. Check it out here and get the cheat sheet above. And don't forget to like and share!

Character in Modern Storytelling

In which our hero defines characterization and lays out the rules...

Also another cheat sheet. As usual, the article is over on the Radish blog, here.

Thanks for reading! I'll be back next week with a write-up on main characters.

Interior Monologue, Soliloquy, and Stream of Consciousness

Hey all! Here's another cheat sheet. You can read the full article about interior monologue here. However, I did not cover the two less common ways to show characters' thoughts in that article: soliloquy and stream of consciousness. I'll dive into them in an episode of my upcoming podcast The Writer's Guide to the Galaxy, which will be launching in the next few weeks, but for now, here's a quick and dirty explanation:
Soliloquy is generally only used in plays. It is where a character speaks his thoughts aloud so the audience may hear them. E.g., Hamlet's famous "To be or not to be..." speech.
Stream of consciousness is really just a different type of interior monologue. You can think of it like unrefined and unfiltered consciousness as compared to the refinement and filtering that goes into crafting the more normal interior monologue.
And that's all for now, see you next week for Characterization!

Tense?

And now for tenses. Here's a quick cheat sheet for which tenses to use in what situation. You can see my full article on the basics over here, and I'll dive even more into tenses in an episode of my upcoming podcast Writer's Guide to the Galaxy. Stay tuned!

A Radish Point of View...

Here's the next article in my writing series. This time I'm talking about Point of View (PoV). Grab the cheat sheet above and check out the article here.

Dialog with (a) Radish

Sorry, folks, I've been AWOL for a couple months working on lots of cool things. And I'm not returning empty handed. Here's the first in an ongoing series of writing articles I've been preparing for our friends over at Radish. This one covers my basic rules on writing dialog tags. Check it out here.

Sorry, folks, I've been AWOL for a couple months working ...

Sorry, folks, I've been AWOL for a couple months working on lots of cool things. And I'm not returning empty handed. Here's the first in an ongoing series of writing articles I've been preparing for our friends over at Radish. This one covers my basic rules on writing dialog tags. Check it out here.

Why "The Force Awakens" Was a Terrible Star Wars Movie (Continued) -The State of the Galaxy Part 2 *SPOILERS*

Ok, here's the bar fight I promised. If you missed the first part, you may want to read it first.

Anyway, to further illustrate the problem of confusion, I'm going extrapolate two scenarios. As bar fights. Because I love analogies.


Scenario 1: The New Republic and First Order are at war.
This extrapolation is supported by a few facts.
Well, I guess we might
 as well go start another war...A group of Republic military officers are waging a guerrilla war within First Order territory.Last we knew, the galaxy was in a state of war and we haven't been told that state of affairs has changed.General Organa, a key figure in reforming the Republic, is involved in the conflict.The name "The Resistance" implies that it's in occupied territory.If the two powers are NOT at war, then the Resistance is a terrorist group and has given up any moral high-ground, which would be crazy in a movie franchise that has always had GOOD vs. EVIL as a major theme.All of the previous movies up till this point have dealt with two different galactic civil wars, so it's a fair assumption that we're again dealing with the same.
More MSPaint!Now that last one isn't a very good reason, but it is a fair assumption, and when telling a story, you have to take your audience's assumptions into account.
So if there's a war going on, then the Resistance is a guerrilla military unit operating behind enemy lines on behalf of the Republic and in coordination with the Republic military (a la the French Resistance of WWII), and the First Order is an imperial war machine still bent on subjugating the galaxy.

The Resistance is defending its home and people from a military junta that is actively attempting to subjugate them.

In barfightese:
Thirty years later, Empire (now calling itself First Order) is still in the bar, still fighting with Rebel (now calling itself New Republic). Meanwhile, Rebel's nephew Resistance starts kicking Empire in the shins, drinking Empire's beer, and breaking Empire's possessions.

Empire tries to defend its shins, beer, and possessions while fighting Rebel, but Resistance is too small and fast, so Empire pulls out its new, even bigger stick (which it somehow managed to afford after losing two sticks already as well as losing its job), and uses it to club Rebel (who somehow still doesn't have a stick of its own).

Resistance breaks Empire's newer bigger stick, flips Empire off, and runs away.


Scenario 2: The two powers are NOT at war.
This extrapolation is also supported by a few facts.
Blow up a planet and people start
freaking out, but eat an entire star
and no one seems to care...The Republic military doesn't seem to be officially involved at all.It's been thirty years.If the war was still going on, surely we would have been told. Seems like it would be a big deal.The Resistance attacked Starkiller Base with nothing more than a handful of suped-up x-wings. Surely the Republic would have contributed something if they were at war... Actually, come to think of it, surely they would have contributed something even if they weren't at war... It blew up planets and ate a star for breakfast.
Anyone remember when the US
supported the Afghani resistance
organization that eventually became
Al-Qaeda?
What a great idea that was...If there's NOT a war, then the Resistance is a guerrilla military unit operating in foreign territory, collecting information and destroying things... Wait, don't we call people who do those things spies and terrorists? But the Resistance are the good guys... And the Republic, who is also supposed to be "good", is supporting them... Huh? Ok. Fine fine. What about the other guys?

Well, the First Order is a military junta who is... well, actually, as far as we can tell, they seem to be minding their own business... Sure they built a ginormous star-eating, planet-destroying base, but for all we know they built that in response to the Resistance's attacks. But more on that after another bar fight.
In barfightese:
Thirty years later, Empire (now calling itself First Order) is sulking in a corner of the bar, sipping its beer and brooding. Rebel (now calling itself New Republic) sends its nephew, Resistance, over to Empire's table to steal Empire's beer and break Empire's most valuable possessions.

Empire tries to defend its beer and possessions, but Resistance is too small and fast, so Empire gets up, pulls out its new, even bigger stick (which it somehow managed to afford after losing two sticks already as well as losing its job), goes over to Rebel and clubs Rebel (who somehow still doesn't have a stick of its own) over the head since Empire can't seem to hit Resistance.

Resistance breaks Empire's newer bigger stick, flips Empire off, and runs away.


The Confusion
Those two stories are way different. One is about a guerrilla army fighting behind enemy lines in one of the most important battles of a war that has lasted 30 years. The other story is about an illegal terrorist group that has been terrorizing a defeated, demoralized, legitimate foreign power for as much as 30 years.
And we're not told which of those stories is the one we're watching, or if we're watching a totally different story. (Those are just the two stories I find most likely.) And it gets really confusing because we have good reasons to believe either case is true.
Behold! All the people who couldn't stop two smugglers,
 a badass but untrained girl, and a janitor from destroying their base...In fact, throughout the movie, we aren't given a single reason as to why the "Resistance" is in First Order territory spying and committing sabotage. But we are told by General Hux that the First Order is attacking the Republic because the Republic has been supporting the terrorism of the Resistance, which is a sentiment that a lot of people (especially here in the US) can sympathize with. No, we wouldn't launch a nuke, but we also wouldn't just sit and take it forever.


But wait! There's more!
Now this is where it starts to get really confusing, because all of this information does exist. There are official canon answers to every question I've raised... So why didn't they take two minutes to give us those answers in the movie?

Well, besides the general trend of cutting exposition from movies, I think the answers may actually be worse than the confusion and lack of answers... I'm pretty sure that whatever explanations you all have come up with in your heads are far better than the official canon. Except maybe for Starkiller Base. Starkiller Base makes way more sense in the book than the movie. But I've run out of time again, so I'm just going to have to cover "The Real Story" next time.

Why "The Force Awakens" Was a Terrible Star Wars Movie (Continued) -The State of the Galaxy Part 1 *SPOILERS*

Before I dive into the deep end of setting here, I want to reiterate that I really enjoyed the movie just like the vast majority of fans out there. However, almost everyone that I've talked to about the movie felt that something was off. I've written these posts to illustrate why the new movie didn't "recapture the magic" of the original, why it didn't feel like Star Wars, and to help my fellow storytellers make informed decisions when crafting their own stories.

If you missed my first post about "The Force Awakens" and would like a quick overview, you can find it here.

I swear that I fully intended for this to only be one post. But setting is just so important, and I really really wanted to give you guys a bar fight. So you get this one today and the bar fight on Friday.

Now that that's all out of the way, time to jump into The Setting.


The Setting. AKA The State of the Galaxy.

Can't find a picture of the
original crawl anywhere...In the original Star Wars movie, now known as Episode IV: A New Hope, the galaxy is in a civil war and the underdog "rebels" have just won their first battle against the Galactic Empire, during which they managed to steal the plans for a WMD, the Death Star.

And that's just what we learn in the opening crawl.

Half an hour into the movie, we learn that a huge war had been fought two decades previous, just before the advent of the Galactic Empire. We learn about the force and about the Jedi and their destruction. We learn that the Emperor has only just dissolved the Galactic Senate, the last vestige of the Galactic Republic, and that the Galactic Empire is an oppressive totalitarian regime willing to destroy planets to cement its control.

I find your lack of exposition disturbing...In the two-minute scene where we first see Darth Vader force-choke someone, we learn everything we need to know about the Emperor, the Empire, Darth Vader, the Death Star, and the Rebel Alliance. And just prior to that scene, we learn everything we need to know about Luke, his father, the Jedi, and the Force.

That doesn't leave much to question, it just leaves us wanting to know more because it's a compelling setting. But most importantly, we understand everyone's motivations. And we don't have to wonder why any of the characters are doing what they are doing.

The Force Awakens on the other hand... In the opening crawl we learn...

Oooooo... High definition...Well, actually the opening crawl is super confusing. Apparently there is a remnant of the Galactic Empire, the First Order, which is trying to kill Luke Skywalker for some unknown reason. And the Republic is back, and they're supporting Leia and some sort of resistance for some unknown reason, who are also apparently hunting Luke in the hopes that he alone in the entire galaxy can restore peace and justice... because apparently the republic isn't cutting it? And so they're funding this to find him... for what? To have him tell them what they're doing wrong? We don't know...

Don't get me wrong, having some mystery here is totally fine, but we end up with way more questions than answers... All we've really learned is that the bad guys are called the First Order instead of the Empire, the good guys are called the Resistance instead of Rebels, and everyone is hunting for Luke Skywalker. There's no other real information in there. It tells us the basic situation but nothing of the setting. Which is fine. It's not good Star Wars (every other Star Wars crawl has given us way more info), but it's fine. As long as we learn what we need to know as the movie progresses.

At least there's more than two this time...So what do we learn about the state of the galaxy in the movie then? Well, not much... We learn that Luke started to rebuild the Jedi, but his nephew killed all the students, and we learn that someone named Snoke is leading a military organization as well as yet another secret society of force users who are bent on the destruction of the Jedi. Because we needed to repeat that plot element too...

We learn nothing about the Republic. Are they still at war with the remnants of the Empire? Why are they supporting the Resistance? Who's in charge? Where is the Republic military during the entire movie while the First Order is blowing up planets?

We learn nothing about the Resistance. Who are they? What are they resisting and why? Why are they looking for Luke? And why didn't they ask the republic for help when they found out about Starkiller base?

At least we do learn a couple tidbits about the First Order. They're led by a force-user (the aforementioned Snoke), and they have some kind of connection to an organization known as the Knights of Ren (the aforementioned secret society). Oh, and we learn that they are really pissed off that the Republic is supporting a group of foreign military insurgents in their territory.

"Lack of information leads to Confusion.
Confusion leads to dissatisfaction.
Dissatisfaction leads to lower critical ratings and
(excepting ginormous franchises) lower sales figures."
-Yoda    Now, I'm not saying that the audience needs every bit of info handed to them, but there's a few critical pieces of information missing. Critical because without these bits of info, the audience is confused. People don't like to be confused. Mystery is OK, suspense is OK, confusion is not...

For example, it's critical to our understanding of both major groups (First Order and Resistance) to know whether or not they're at war with each other. Without that information, we don't know why either group is doing what they are doing. It's like watching a bar fight without knowing who either of the participants are, who started the fight, and what the fight is about. It may be fun to watch, but it's difficult to care about the parties involved or who wins. It's a spectacle instead of a story. And I'm not saying that's necessarily a bad thing, I'm just saying that it's not Star Wars. Star Wars was a story with spectacle. "The Force Awakens" is just a spectacle.

But I've gone on long enough today. In the next post, I'll illustrate my points about confusion using a bar fight as an analogy. In the meantime, enjoy this meme I prepared that covers the previous six movies.

I can't believe I created a meme for this...

Why "The Force Awakens" Was a Terrible Star Wars Movie *SPOILERS*

Ever since the new Star Wars movie came out, I've been having the same discussion over and over again. Everyone loves the new Star Wars movie, but something is off/missing/wrong/not quite right. As an editor, I spend most of my time figuring out all the things that are off/missing/wrong/not quite right with stories. So if you feel the same way about the new movie, read on to see why. There's a lot here, so I'll give you an overview, and if you want the analysis, just look for my subsequent posts over the next couple weeks.
First, I have to say that I loved the movie. It was fun and exciting. The cinematography and pacing were amazing. The new cast was awesome. It was everything I've come to expect from a Disney summer blockbuster.

Which is the problem. It was nothing more than another Disney summer blockbuster. It may as well have just been another Marvel movie. Fun and explosive, but shallow. Lacking depth.

Star Wars wasn't just a spectacle. It was also a deep, logically consistent universe behind an accessible and familiar fantasy story. When you scratch the surface of this new movie, you find an inaccessible jumbled mess.

For example:


Yay! I can still use MSPaint! The Setting AKA the State of the Galaxy. In the original movie, there's a galactic civil war going on, and we understand the motivations for why everyone is doing what they are doing. In the new movie, we just have two opposing military organizations trying to find Luke, and we don't even know why except that Leia misses him...

I'll go into a lot more detail about the setting in the next post.


The Conflict(s)This one starts to get a bit complicated because there are multiple conflicts going on in each movie (as there should be), so I'm just going to discuss the main driving conflicts in this summary. In-depth analysis coming soon.

Runs on companionship, apparently...In the original movie, the rebels have stolen the plans to the Empire's big WMD, the Death Star. Leia is trying to get them back to the rebel command structure, and Darth Vader is trying to get them back. This carries us all the way through the story and right to the climax.

In the new movie, we're told that the conflict is "find Luke before the other team," but we never find out why that's important, it has nothing to do with the climax, and it's resolved by a huge bit of Deus ex Machina, through no effort or triumph of the main characters, when R2 suddenly gives them the answer. Because apparently no one could find the "ON" button...


The Heroes NOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!!Again, I'm just going to cover the primary heroes here, and I'll go more in-depth in a future post.

Luke. Straight from the monomyth. Luke is an orphan farmboy who meets a wise old wizard who gives him a special sword and teaches him magic. He goes off on a quest to rescue the princess from the evil sorcerer. Then he destroys the sorcerer's fortress and ends his reign of terror. Classic. This character never gets old. Of course there's a lot more to it, which I'll go into in aforesaid future post.

I know, right?Rey. They tried the same formula but missed some very key parts. For one, she didn't actually learn anything. She somehow already knew how to outfly First Order pilots who had supposedly been training their entire lives, and she apparently already knew how to use the force since she succeeded the very first time she tried. And this is the main issue. She suffers from the Superman problem. There's nothing that she can't do. Her "growth" in the movie was limited to nothing more than leaving home.




The Villains AYYY!To me, this may be the most important thing about Star Wars. A good villain. Just going to cover the basics here, but keep an eye out for the in-depth analysis soon.
There's two big things that the new movie really "missed" in regard to its villains.
The first is accessible motivations. We can easily understand that Darth Vader is trying to recover something that was stolen and, more existentially, that he is trying to crush the rebellion in order to secure his regime's control of the galaxy. For Kylo Ren, we only have the vague existential motivation of "finishing what Vader started." But we don't actually know what that means to Kylo or why he's trying to find Luke.
Ya know, Kylo, Luke was doing the
emo thing before it was popular.Second is competence. The new movie had the most inept group of villains I've seen outside of a comedy. They reminded me more of the villains from Spaceballs than their counterparts from the original Star Wars. Kylo Ren fails at everything he tries to accomplish in the movie except for murdering a town full of nearly-helpless civilians at the beginning. The villains were so incompetent that it doesn't feel like the heroes really overcame anything.




Again, I loved the movie for the summer blockbuster (in December) that it was, I just expect more from Star Wars. But that's enough for now. Next week, I'll post my in-depth analysis of the setting.
Thanks for reading!