A.R. Knight's Blog, page 9

What “Last Week Tonight” teaches me about Exposition

Wait, I hear you saying: this here is a nonfiction show! It’s got comedy, sure, but the crux of what Oliver’s doing is spreading facts!

Guess what, folks: Novels, short stories, and comics are in the same business. The sole difference is the world to which those facts apply.

For folks who don’t know, Last Week Tonight (which I’m shortening to LWT for the rest of this post) is essentially a weekly adaptation of The Daily Shows’ comedic news format, though I’d argue that LWT is more serious its predecessor really was. A big portion of this comes from the show’s format, in which half or more of its running time in a given week is often devoted to a single story. We’re often talking 15 minutes or more on one subject, and often these aren’t headliners – a week ago, LWT spent a long time going over the Italian election, which is undoubtedly important to the world, but doesn’t quite have the attention-grabbing focus (in the US, anyway) of, say, gun control or North Korea.

In a graceless pivot, these segments parallel what most authors and screenwriters have to do to immerse audiences in the worlds they’re creating. In the stories they’re telling. You, as the creator, need the audience to sit there and absorb information about your piece, especially at the beginning, and be entertained at the same time. This challenge increases the farther away from ‘reality’ your work gets – consider, say, the opening crawl of Star Wars. Lucas effectively shoves paragraphs of floating space text at you to give just enough context, and, thanks to a rousing score, you manage to stay awake long enough for the spaceships to start shooting. Harry Potter opens with a tease about normalcy, which, since the cover talks about a magical stone and shows a wizard, you’re not really buying, and its at the start of the 3rd ‘graph where it drops the word secret. Now you’re intrigued – what secret is so terrible that these ordinary folk can’t bear? That holds you long enough to find out about the boy, and then we’re off.

Learning is hard. Gathering new information and making sense of it all is hard. Constructing a new reality on the fly to match the needs of a work of fiction is, well, work.

LWT makes this process easier by interjecting comedy. It leverages jokes, intercut breaks, and sometimes-random segues to keep you engaged. If you’re chuckling every couple of minutes because an expose on a mining CEO is being delivered by someone in a squirrel costume, you’re going to pay attention when the real points get delivered. If you know, at the end of Oliver’s next spiel, there’s going to be something funny, you’re more likely to listen so that you’re in on it when the joke eventually drops. In that way, LWT keeps you engaged even while delivering a straight shot of information to your mind.

The challenge, in fiction, is to keep that same loop of information and entertainment going. You want your audience to know what the Shire is, and how hobbits work, but if they’re going to bother learning about that, you have to tease them with a magical ring and a distant dark lord first. If you’re going to introduce a vast world of warring families, kingdoms and power struggles, maybe in the middle of that you have a boy catch some brother-sister loving and get shoved out a window. Keeps the audience invested.

So next time you’re looking at how to get an audience engaged in your world, take a cue from LWT and interject some action, comedy, or dialogue that doesn’t require knowledge of your universe to understand. It’ll help relax your readers, and buy you time to pass along the crucial, need-to-know details of how your world works.

Squirrel costumes are a bonus.

A couple things:

I’ve found it slightly ironic that I selected paperless for some tax documents, only to have the CPA require them in paper form, so now I’m printing them off (using the paper, and paying for my own ink) just to put them all together in an envelope and send. I cannot wait until everything is just done through secure electronic submission. Please oh please.
I read this review of a new Chrysler minivan and immediately went back to my childhood, thinking about how awesome it would have been with one of these. As a childless adult, I’m not ashamed to say the tech in minivans these days is pretty amazing. Who wouldn’t use a built-in vacuum?

Lester Dent and Formula

Productivity and creativity are two concepts often placed at odds with one another – the idea being that good art takes time. This isn’t really borne out by evidence, and a statement I rather prefer is this one: The art takes the time the artist requires.

Lester Dent, a pulphouse author from the late 20’s and 30’s, is a grand example of this – the man churned out story after story for monthly magazines at an astounding rate of speed (especially when you consider the pen-and-paper/typewriter equipment he was working with). He wrote well over 150 novels in a 30 year career, plus many, many short stories. These weren’t Epic-Fantasy tomes, but Dent wrote over 200,000 words a month, as this piece states and which seems in the realm of possibility, considering his output, that means an average of 6000 words per day. An average paperback page contains 250 words or so, meaning Dent cranked out 24 pages every day of fiction. Equate this to an artist like, say, Bob Ross who could put together a complete landscape painting in a single 30-minute show.

Dent and Ross don’t get their productivity through some magical incantation. They didn’t, to my knowledge, perform some ritual sacrifice or discover a fallen meteorite that granted them superhuman abilities. Rather, they used formula. They kept their work, mostly, in line with a template that worked for them. Knowing when certain things had to happen for his characters let Dent focus on setting and dialogue. He could merrily type away, note when he’d reached a certain part of his story, and then kick the next section off without pausing to ask “what happens now?”.

The point I’m taking away from this isn’t that, to be productive, we all need to follow what Dent and Ross did. Instead, we might look to them for inspiration, for the drive to find a formula that works for us, whether we’re writing fiction, making movies, or even just knocking out a day’s worth of tasks. There’s value in making templates, even if you don’t think one could apply to your situation/goal. Give it a shot. See what you can come up with.

I mean, if I could come up with a formula for wrangling my cats consistently every day so they didn’t destroy my house, that’d save me so much time. And furniture.

A couple other things:

Dent also managed to snag a pilot’s license, climbed mountains, and passed electrician/plumbing exams, at least partly because of the time he saved by adhering to his process. I’m sure, with that extra time, I could play more with my overlords; the cats.
I’m late to the game, but the current workout show of choice is The Americans, which is proving to be a fascinating, fun dive into an early 80’s thriller. I love that their ‘day jobs’ are as travel agents – something that gives plausible excuses for being active at all hours and often away from the office. Wonder what current-day spies prefer to have as their undercover gig of choice – remote software developer? Uber driver?

Wyoming is Cold

You rarely see temperate desolation. It’s either scorching desert, or, as in Wind River‘s case, an expanse of Wyoming wilderness where, as Jeremy Renner’s wildlife ranger states, “It’s too cold to snow.”

The movie, which is available on US Netflix now, is a taut, interesting thriller that uses a familiar combination of young, naive hero out of her element and an older, experienced mentor to guide her. The difference, to me, is that Wind River spends far less time with the rookie than with the Renner’s weathered hero.

This turn could backfire – it’s harder, obviously, to convey the history that has made a person who they are than to start with a blank slate. Wind River does this with a mix of show-and-tell, with numerous physical cues in Renner’s appearance, the setup of his house (pictures of unexpected loved ones), and, most interesting, an opening conversation with his ex-wife that immediately sets Renner’s character up as one who both knows the costs of his decisions and accepts them anyway to live the life he wants.

Anyway, it’s worth a look if you want a murder mystery with more character depth than clues to solve. Also, hard to get enough of the shots of Wyoming wilderness. Having been out that way before, it’s definitely gorgeous and worth a visit. Bring your skis and snowmobile.

A couple things:

Continuing to love the voice recorder over my phone. Holds a lot more dialogue, and it’s easy to plug into the laptop and transcribe. If you’re serious about dictation, look at getting one of these. I use one by Sony that’s relatively cheap and superb.
Starting Meddling Kids by Edgar Cantero, which is something like an alternate, real-world version of Scooby Doo where the kids are adults. Giving me IT vibes, but with more comedy.

A Snowy Morning

There’s a thing with March in Wisconsin (and, I imagine, with anywhere in the chillier parts of the world) where the ground can go from muddy grass to covered with a half-foot of snow in an evening. It remains beautiful for a few days before descending back to its brown sludgy awfulness.

It’s still gorgeous now, and it’s still snowing.

My back is already dreading the shoveling to come.

Couple other things:

Like that Shape of Water picked up Best Picture and Del Toro Best Director. Both are risk-takers, and both explore themes and characters too often left aside in favor of more standard, safer things. Cool.
Finished N.K. Jemison’s Broken Earth trilogy. Generally enjoyed it, and the last book, and overall structure, is a great example of making the past relevant to a current story without dragging the reader through onerous flashbacks.
Editing through book one in the new series, which is a return to space-action science fiction, but with an alien twist. Working on completing the first three books or so before number one comes out, which is why this is taking longer, but it’s a cool new universe to explore. Archivos has been instrumental in helping keep track of everything, so make sure to look at that if you’ve a need for a world-building toolkit.

Phraseology

There are interesting phrases that come up in NK Jemison’s Broken Earth Trilogy (and this happens in virtually all Sci fi and Fantasy novels) which have, from time to time, broken immersion for me. Concepts that are so layered in the current “Earth” history that to present them as things characters would know or use in other worlds is a cheat that, for the most part, is easy to overlook.

Take, for example, the concept of measurement. It’s useful to say how far away something is when you’re describing it. Or how high a character stands. However, saying a character is six feet tall is a strange thing in a fantasy world – unless you assume that they, too, would decide to make the basis of their measurements the “length of an average man’s foot” and, for the yard, the length of a man’s nose to the end of his arm. If your world is dominated by alien species and dragons, such measurements seem especially arbitrary.

Or the verbal cues used by characters – phrases that clearly come from the author’s cultural experience or background. Even in narration, these idioms and other turns of phrase would seem natural to someone talking today, but assuming they would develop independently in a world so unlike our own seems like a stretch.

But what is the solution? To scrub a manuscript of anything remotely resembling current-day English?

No. While I don’t think relying on quips and sayings common now (because they may not be common tomorrow) is a great plan, using general concepts at the expense of teeny bits of logic is worth it. Your reader, after all, is the primary audience. If they can’t understand what’s going on because you’ve developed your own metric system and speak entirely in self-developed turns of phrase, well, they’re going to hate you a lot more than if your reptilian worm monster refers to its height in yards.

But I do think, as authors and creators of anything, it’s important not to hedge on key things. It’s important that your characters are authentic to their setting. That they talk and act like someone in your world would, and not like someone in, say, your local mall.

Do that, and readers will happily let you fudge the little things. After all, I keep coming back to Jemisin’s trilogy, which is excellent, inches and all.

Archivos and World-Building Tools

The Internet is, in many ways, like an island on which random chests of treasure appear. While wandering its jungles, you might stumble upon something new, something incredibly value and entirely not what you thought you needed.

The most recent treasure for me is called Archivos. It allows you to strew about all the little nodes sticking around your mind from your stories and connect them all. Like one of those maps with pins and yarn going between every sticking. You put pictures on your characters, on your races and your events. Sort them all into a massive timeline and then upload maps that you’ve hand drawn to ruled notebook paper so everyone can see the exact distance between the calamity and the heroes awakening.

It’s quite neat. There’s a certain thing that happens when you start writing: your brain, after a minute or so of warming up, begins to spew forth such a racket of randomness that it’s nigh impossible to keep straight over whole novel, let alone two or three or four. Continuity errors start popping up, from the minor (she was a blond a minute ago, now she’s a brunette) to the major (didn’t he die in the last book?). To chase down and confirm these potential story-bombs, you have to hunt through your previous work to see just what you called so-and-so, or what the name was for that alien, or when the big balloon blast occur?

Archivos, provided you take the time, which is not insubstantial, to enter all the data in the first place becomes a repository for the randomness. It allows you to take the things that would normally be carving up your brain and put them into a friendly, web-based interface. You can look them up later, and even attach fancy photos if you have an image in your head.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t say that Archivos is very similar to the StoryShop app I wrote about earlier. Like StoryShop, Archivos isn’t really accessible off-line, at least that I’ve found. But unlike StoryShop, I don’t use it for writing. You can’t, really. It’s there for storing knowledge. A story bible creator, and in that it works just fine.

Which means I’m now making due with a bunch of tools, which I’ll list out here:

Archivos for story bible/tracking
Scrivener for writing.
Dragon for dictation.
Photoshop for graphic design.
Vellum for print/ebook formatting.
WordPress for things like this blog and my publishing website
Hootsuite for social media jazz (just because it saves time and allows effective cross-posting)
MailChimp for Newsletter jazz.

Yikes.

A Better Aquaman: The Shape of Water

I saw The Shape of Water recently and found it functioned like a beautifully rendered vision of someone’s dream. Someone who had either been reading a lot of Aquaman comics, or doing a fair amount of drugs while sitting in front of an aquarium. That’s the thing about movies: they are visions. Those of the director, the writer, the actors, the cinematographer, and a whole assembly of people who have come together to enact what was, at one point, a jumbled imagination in someone’s mind.

The Shape of Water executes his vision not flawlessly, but with cracked exuberance. There’s so much joy in its shots; those austere labs, tiny apartments, and diners. The movie spins Soviet intrigue, mad scientists, and the creature from the Black Lagoon together for… love. It works, and it’s fun to watch the plots whirl around because the cast does everything they can to sell their characters.

It all leads to a satisfying, if unsurprising end. I didn’t mind though, because what makes this movie so fascinating isn’t the main plot. It’s the intertwining lives of everyone involved in this madhouse.

There are little details strewn about this movie. Cracks filled in that would normally be left to the void in other films. We get a wholly unnecessary, and yet wonderfully appreciated side story involving the main character’s best friend: an out of work commercial painter. He’s trying to work up to spilling his affections for somebody, and happens to eat a whole lot of pie he doesn’t want to in the process. That, plus his difficult search for a job in this new world of photography, plays out in a few scenes that add a touch of color to the movie. The Shape of Water reminds you that this is all happening in a real world, where everyone has the same problems we do. It’s not Marvel Comics. World annihilation is not on the table.

But there is a water monster. One that obeys the horror movie principle by keeping its mysteries to the edges of the story, where we (and the characters) are free to speculate about what it really is.

So is The Shape of Water good? Is it worth seeing?

I think that depends on your appetite for imagination. There are certain boundaries that are stretched in films like these. In director Guillermo Del Toro’s other work too. If you like Pan’s Labyrinth, or even Hellboy, you’ll find plenty to enjoy about this one. If you find things that stretch realism, well, unrealistic, then perhaps the sight of a merman is enough of a giveaway that this one’s not for you.

There’s silly fun in seeing science-fiction oddities come to screen. To have them so widely nominated for Oscars, as the Shape of Water has 13 nominations currently. Seeing a whole vision come through all the Hollywood machinery intact is a delight in and of itself. Like going to an art gallery and spotting a master’s paintings. Even if they’re not your favorite, you can still respect the craft involved and take some joy in witnessing that kind of effort.

So there we are then. The Shape of Water is a master class in filming a fairy tale. I say go see it. I say open your eyes and ears to something little different, something that is by turns absurd and by other turns heartfelt and by most turns beautiful.

New Covers, because I like fire, apparently

Branding is a toxic word for me. It comes loaded with connotations, with expectations of corporatized life where the creativity has been sucked away by a vacuum, taken outside, and beaten into oblivion by a bunch of faceless goons.

This, of course, is stupid.

Branding (I tell myself), is better thought of as the way in which you help your audience find you.

Branding is the scattered bread crumbs in the vast forest of content that help your readers find their way to your newest book, article, latte foam art, etc. And it can take pretty much any form you want it to. Trademarked logos are popular with big companies (or companies that wish they were big). Ad jingles worked back when more people watched TV with commercials (or listened to broadcast radio) – you’d hear a few notes and immediately know just what was going to be talked about.

For authors, our best shot at branding comes from the book covers we get to display on store shelves or, more likely, in little thumbnails on the internet. Which means we don’t have a lot of real estate to use to capture eyeballs. Now, I bet if you look at your favorite authors, you’ll see that they (or their cover designers) tend to compose their books the same way. James Patterson jams his name in with huge fonts. On many Stephen King covers, the KING is enlarged and looks clear even at a distance. You know who wrote that one in a single glance.

With all of mine, I endeavor to slot my name towards the top. It’s not that large, though readable from a thumbnail if you try. That’s mostly because my name, alone, isn’t the point of the covers. I’m not a celebrity (I wish. Or do I?), so blowing my name up on the cover might not be the best tactic. A reader seeing that wouldn’t really know what to make of it (again, yet. this strategy might twist around if I ever achieve some modicum of fame).

The title is another “written” part of a cover and, odd as it may seem, does more with how it’s presented than with what it actually says. Take my cover up there. “Riven”, in and of itself, doesn’t mean a whole lot. It’s a somewhat obscure way to say that something’s split in half, but that doesn’t really convey genre or setting. Put it in a bold sans serif font, at a slant, like this: RIVEN – and you’ve got something that could work as a sci-fi or thriller novel. Presented as it is above, with the etched, somewhat “pen and ink” letters, and it conveys a more archaic, fantasy vibe (at least, I hope so). Point being: when it comes to branding, the words of the title are often second to how they’re presented in telling the reader just what they’re getting.

Lastly, and most importantly, is the cover image. If you look at N.K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth trilogy, you’ll see that each book has a somewhat indecipherable close up of some intricate ruins. There’s no clear relationship between those photographs and anything happening in the book, but they convey solid rock, and with the carvings, an old fantasy. Each one also, easily, relates to the others in the same trilogy. If you glanced at the three of them next to each other on a book shelf or web page, just by their covers, you would be able to tell they’re related. With the Riven Trilogy, I’m doing something similar with the new covers – each has a different color flame, a different center image, but the organization is the same. It’s easy to tell that they belong together.

With the end goal being, of course, that the reader can find their way easily from one to the next.

House Rules

You’ve been there. We all have. You’re sitting around the table with six people instead of five and all the games you brought only work for five instead of six and you want to panic. Chills, the sweats. You start to mumble up things like maybe if you can just find a deck of playing cards some game that everyone can play will materialize from your childhood memories. Or maybe, you suggest, someone might want to sit by the fire. There has to be one person doesn’t like or games anyway. Or maybe you just hope for something to come in over the news, like a missile alert, say.

Of course, there’s something else. Something you haven’t thought of, that doesn’t appear in the rule books or in the little figures on the box that tell you, with unbending finality, how many people are allowed to play. It’s a cheat code. A hack. And it can save you from the most terrible of situations –  where someone feels left out.

House rules. Changing something about your activity to make a more inclusive, dangerous, or downright more entertaining for the situation that you’re in.

Let’s walk ourselves back to Sunday. It’s brunch. We’re circling the coffee table with the aforementioned too many players and too few spots situation. Thankfully, we’ve chosen a flexible game. The Mountains of Madness. Some games, when you have too many players, slow to a crawl and everyone proceeds to check out their phones to see who’s popping what pictures on Instafacebookgramchat. In Mountains of Madness, everyone plays at the same time. A party game gimmick mixed with serious game strategy. Ideal for unorthodox expansion.

So we play with six. I deal an extra hand. We get off the mountain alive, though, granted it was probably easier than the game’s creators intended. Even so, the experience comes with smiles and laughter. People are able to dash away fro a mimosa refill, or take care of kids, and there’s plenty around to keep the game moving.

We have a good time. I cheated, and nobody cared.

So next time you’re in an awkward player situation, see if you can’t bend or break your favorite game to accommodate your party. It might work. And sure, it might not, but you’ll probably have fun anyway.

Bob Ross and the Art of Chill – A Boardgame that Actually Exists

Gag gifts. Those things given for laughs that, often, become nothing more than Goodwill fodder after the mirth has fallen away. Bob Ross: The Art of Chill Game, given to me by my brother-in-law for Christmas, is not a gag gift.

Or rather, it is, but one with substance. Not a lot, but even a small bit of something makes it an outlier in the world of cheap, one-time laughs.

I’m not going to go into Bob Ross here (he’s a painter with a fascinating history – google him). I will go into the game, which is both simple and better than it has any right to be.

I can also say that the Art of Chill game is best experienced while actually watching Bob Ross. In this game, you gradually complete paintings, and doing that while Bob Ross actually paints a very similar landscape on the TV nearby is both surreal and comforting. You achieve a sort of painting zen. One that quickly vanishes when you realize the Bob in the game is speeding his way through the painting far faster than the Bob on TV, and you’ve just rolled his face on the die for the third turn in a row and now all your colors are worthless because the scene just switched from a wintery forest to a tropical island.

So yeah. You’re all painting, more or less. You collect colors of paint in Ticket-to-Ride style – namely by choosing a number of cards each turn, and when you have enough of the ones you want, completing a “feature” part of the painting, such as trees or clouds, for points. First one with a bunch of points becomes the “most chill” and wins the game. You could argue that the person who’s collecting the most points is working the hardest and is, therefore, the “least chill”, but we don’t have time for your logic here.

Every painting offers 3 of these features to complete, and you’re incentivized to complete those features before other players to get bonus points. Usually, however, the bigger obstacle is the master of chill himself: Bob Ross. See, he’s trying to complete every painting along with you. Each turn, before drawing and playing cards, the players roll a special dice. Half of the six sides are pasted over with Bob Ross’s face, and that face quickly becomes the Mark of Doom. Not only are you, the player, robbed of a potential bonus action via the other dice sides, Bob happily whisks another space forward on the current painting. This may “complete” a feature for Bob, robbing the group of bonus points, or even complete the painting entirely, rendering prepped paints useless. Kinda like if your Ticket to Ride routes occasionally shortened or vanished entirely.

Anyway, this lends a decidedly un-chill anxiety to the game as everyone adjusts their tactics based on the rolls of the dice. One of us, and she eventually won the game, earned her last third of points by forgoing the painting entirely (and, by extension, Bob’s sabotage) by buying up “Technique” cards. These grant a small, one-time blast of chill points and additional bonuses over the long term. However, by grabbing one or two of these every turn, she outpaced the painting points we chumps were making, and thus became the chillest of us all. Essentially, she “knew” how to paint everything, but actually did no painting. So, perhaps that’s actually chill?

So it’s a workable game with mechanisms and everything. Is it good? Meh. I’d pull it out over something like Candyland, because there’s some strategy. The paintings you complete are pretty (and are reprints of actual Bob Ross paintings), and the color/brush combo might play well with young kids, even if they wouldn’t have a clue as to why this strange man is racing them to paint things. Whomever goes first gets a significant advantage, because they’ll get one more turn than everyone else (our winner went first, and players one and two led the whole game) and can generally complete features first for the most points.

Still, it’s hard to hate on a licensed property that actually tries. So if you give this as a gag gift, be happy that what you’ve given (or received) isn’t the worst thing in the world. But if you’re looking at it for yourself?

Chill, man. And get something better.