Get Writing! Characters…

Posted on August 24, 2017 by D Standard 1

Luna, Dudley, Fred, George, Cho, James, Lilly, Viktor…

You know them instantly. Even though it wasn’t their name on the cover. And we’re willing to bet you can name at least a dozen more of the characters that shaped Harry’s world. (Go on, do it! At least 12. Go!) Another roll of the dice says you know each of those characters’ histories, their arcs, their quirks, and the roles they each played in Harry’s life.

Luna

A good story has a leading character (or more than one) that you can root for, and supporting characters that you can relate to. But how many books or movies have a whole cast that you feel are part of your family? That you’d really want to be part of your family?

Moment of silence

Of those few that come to mind, how many are some of your favorite books of all time?

Characters play a pivotal role in every good story. Or, at least, they should. This is why you have to go through your work and make sure that every character is memorable; for those characters who are there just to advance the plot or provide exposition, give them something real to do, something to feel, something that makes us feel, or laugh, or recognize something of ourselves in them.

Weasleys

Once you’ve done that, you’ll be ready. Because our exercise this time is more like an exorcise…

Remove the least significant character in your work.

Maybe one day Adam will come back to Supernatural.

If they are truly insignificant, removing them will quicken the pace, give another more meaningful character something more to do, and avoid any confusion the reader or viewer may have in keeping your cast straight in their mind.

This should be challenging. If it’s not—and you George RR Martin-ed one of your cast with zero hesitation—then jump right back in there and do it again with the next least significant character.

Be ruthless.

Keep going until all you are left with is your very own Weasley family. (Except Percy)

Harsh but real. Sorry, Molly.

How to cope with the end of #Supernatural

Posted on June 1, 2016 by D Standard 1

This is always a dark time in the calendar of any Supernatural fan.

The #SupernaturalSeasonFinale has come, and gone. The road so far is now in the rearview mirror for those long, long summer months.

Click here for 8 books that (a) will help you cope; (b) would be what Sam, Dean, Cas etc. would be reading to help deal with hiatus!

Supernatural Season 11 Finale

Editing: Plot

Posted on May 26, 2016 by D Standard 2

OK. Let’s recap. You wrote the first draft. You’ve given yourself a break and you’re ready to look at your work with fresh eyes. That original first draft is saved, hopefully in a few locations… you know, just in cases.

Jamie

Now it’s time to go through it and make sure you have the all-important plot.

Because the plot is your purpose for telling the story; it’s the glue that holds your masterpiece together.

Stories come to us in fits and bursts. Sometimes they flow, and other times they trickle, and often, the story you thought you were telling when you first started typing is a completely different tale by the time you’re done. Which means you have to go back and make sure that everything is cohesive.

Basically, you don’t want your work to be Rachel’s Thanksgiving dessert from Friends. Ground beef is fine, but not in a fruity dessert. Make sure you all your ingredients make either Shepherd’s Pie or an English Trifle, not some unpalatable combination of the two. (Genre-mashing can be great, but it has to be done smoothly!)

Rachel Trifle

English foods aside, you don’t want contradictions in your plot. With your characters, it can be a good thing, even a grounding thing, as long as you give solid character-based reasons for it, but with plot it can weaken your tale. This means cutting the “ground beef” out. The old kill your darlings quote applies here. You might have a great scene or awesome character, but if it undermines your plot it’ll have to be saved for another story — the one about Shepherd’s Pie, perhaps?

Everything must serve the plot. And if you’ve done your job well, plot and character will overlap majorly. Even in a case-of-the-week TV show, the cases tie back to the main characters’ season/series arcs in some way. In the CW’s Supernatural, for example, at the exact moment Sam Winchester is facing the possibility of having to sacrifice his brother Dean for the greater good, the brothers meet a girl with a werewolf sister who is out of control.

Supernatural Werewolf

If she can’t tame her sister, she’ll have to make the ultimate sacrifice and take her out. The episode is a tight standalone story, but it holds up a mirror to the brothers’ relationship and hints at what might be coming for them.

Awesome costume design detail: Sam and Dean are even wearing the same color scheme as the sisters, to help emphasize the mirroring

And remember, your plot manipulations and machinations and mechanics—and other things beginning with “m”—shouldn’t be obvious. There shouldn’t be billboards advertising “foreshadowing”… it should be subtle AND entertaining. Some of the best stories, the ones that stay with us, only reveal how it’s glued together much later in the story. (The gold standard of awesome plotting is still Die Hard, btw. Just saying).

So in this first pass of editing, focus on removing what doesn’t work. e.g. scenes that don’t further the plot or the character, or slow things down, or take your story off track in some way (no matter how much you love it), add in what’s needed to keep the plot together, and finesse each point so that the reader can’t see the working mechanics of it all. You can do this by making key plot moments funny, or action-oriented, or a major character moment… or distract the reader with flying monkeys… you’re basically being a magician and using sleight of hand, making the reader/audience see one thing, when you’re really doing something else.

Flying Monkeys

For example, in the opening minutes of Die Hard, John McClane’s seatmate on the plane tells McClane that when he gets to his hotel, he needs to take off his shoes and socks and “make fists with his toes” to relax. McClane thinks this is crazy, but when he gets to Nakatomi Plaza, he does it, and it works. You think that’s the payoff… but that’s the moment when Hans Gruber shows up, forcing McClane to spend the rest of the movie barefoot (and to run over broken glass at one point). That throwaway comment was a setup to help make things very difficult for the hero later on — something all plots need to do!

It’s a setup for a plot point that’s also a character beat… and it happens so quickly and entertainingly you don’t notice it’s either! That’s how it’s done folks

It’s true that characters can change us and scenes can stay with us, but a good, tight plot is what makes us fall in love with everything in the story. No matter what type of story you’re telling, there should always be a bit of romance between the story and the reader. The plot is how you woo them to fall in love with your work.

Things We Like: Supernatural

Posted on November 12, 2015 by D Standard 1

Get this:

According to the lore, it’s really tough for a TV show to last more than a few seasons. It’s even tougher for it to stay good. And it’s basically impossible for it to stay at the very top of its game (and the top of everyone else’s game too).

But Supernatural doesn’t follow those rules. It’s like nothing we’ve seen before, Bobby.

Much like great rock’n’roll is based around “three chords and the truth,”, Supernatural has a similar stripped-back but insanely high-yielding premise and story engine: two brothers, a ’67 Impala, and an unending supply of monsters.

Unending supply of monsters not pictured

From that simplest of foundations, the various show runners, from Eric Kripke through Sera Gamble to Carver/Edlund, have forged eleven unstoppable, powerhouse seasons. We have to say it again: It’s seriously rare for a TV drama to be punching with the same weight after eleven seasons.

Yet Supernatural is hitting harder than ever.

How do they do that? How do they deal with the apocalypse in season 5, and still keep raising the stakes in season 11? They find a way. They work it out. They always do. Here’s how —

They take the key ingredients for good drama: dynamic character dynamics (yeah, we went there), reversals, setups, payoffs and callbacks, developing motifs, and a constant evolving of the stakes, and the format. And they use a few key, powerful questions to power it: What does family mean? Where is home? What does that even mean when you’re constantly on the run, on the move, on the hunt?

Dean. And a scarecrow (spoiler: not one of the good guys).

And then they execute that with extremely smart, clever, self-aware writing, inventive but grounded directing, and some truly great acting.

Sam, covered in blood. Pretty regular occurrence.

In this show, drama, plot, character, emotion and humor are all intertwined. They’re all one thing. There are heavy moments, terrifying moments, light moments, all bound by a roughhouse humor, the kind of humor that helps you cope with the uncopable, that helps you deal with stuff that’s way above your pay grade. It’s humor like a bar brawl; the Winchesters trade quips like punches, sometimes alongside actual punches (they are brothers, after all).

A show can’t last for 11 seasons without rock-solid emotional and psychological underpinnings, and an engine that can yield constant and evolving conflict. Supernatural is a masterclass in show construction, character development, and the art of the 22-episode arc (and the art of the 229 episode arc as of the time of writing!).

Supernatural always evolves in ways you never expect

Watch the pilot again, and see how show creator Eric Kripke did it. It’s deceptively simple. We see the two boys at a very young age as the defining incident of their lives takes place, then we cut to 22 years later when Sam is at college, and the same incident repeats, just as Dean comes back into Sam’s life. The gears of life grind on, and Sam has no choice but to follow Dean into the wilderness.

And THAT’s how you set up a series in your pilot.

Sam was supposed to be the lead character, the Luke Skywalker, while Dean was positioned as the Han Solo type, essential, but secondary to the lead. That soon changed as both brothers took and held center stage. The writers gave Dean more to do alongside Sam, and that’s one of the key strengths of the show: if you want your show to last, give your actors something to do. Both Jared Padalecki and Jensen Ackles get intense emotional scenes, awkward and hilarious physical comedy, subtle snark, action, confusion, heartbreak, fear, hope, cynicism, soul-less fury, and much more besides. The showrunners keep throwing stuff at them, and they keep hitting acting home runs.

Supernatural keeps things fresh and relevant in other ways too. It’s important to nourish your fanbase, to be self-aware, to be able to poke fun at your own show, and not be scared to evolve your format and characters. The show gradually introduced two essential characters, the angel Castiel, and the demon Crowley, firstly as small roles for a few episodes, but, as the brilliant Misha Collins (proving that “acting on camera” really is one of his “special skills”) and genius Mark Sheppard worked hard, crushing it on a regular basis, they proved how capable they were with the show’s tone (and how popular they were with the fans), and they became series regulars alongside the brothers. With four leads, the emotional and plot possibilities increased exponentially, allowing for season-long arcs based on Castiel/Heaven, and Crowley/Hell.

Castiel, Crowley, Dean and Sam.

Nourishing the fanbase and having the skill to be meta without sacrificing the integrity of the show (going beyond postmodern to a post-postmodern state, a kind of genuine and sincere postmodernism) has also helped the show stay as damn good as it’s ever been. The 200th episode was a beautiful example of how a show can deconstruct itself and still move you to tears. Once a show proves it can do that… it can do any damn thing it wants.

So, 11 seasons in, Supernatural shows no signs of slowing down, and there’s no reason it should. It’s the show that has everything.

Watching short movies

Posted on September 24, 2015 by D Standard 1

Fun fact! If you want to make a short film, a good first step is to watch short films. It’s a great way to see what cool things other filmmakers have come up with, and also to see just how endless the possibilities are for what short films can be. You’ll see so many different ways of opening a short, of setting up a story, of telling and resolving a story, all within the space of a few mins (sometimes shorts are more like 20-30 mins, but most are 15m or under). And you’ll realize, you can do anything! Yay! Also? You can do anything! Argh! What will you do??!

We’ll cover what makes a great short movie story next time, but for now, let’s focus on seeing what’s out there, and how some great directors got their starts.

Eric Kripke, creator and showrunner of CW’s Supernatural, got his start with short movies. His second, Battle Of The Sexes, was at the higher end of the short movie budget spectrum ($28,o00), but it showcases what short movies can do best: the reversal. We start with a low key situation (man hitting on a woman in bar), which partway through is flipped entirely into a more sci-fi comedy direction. Many short movies depend on a twist/punchline/reveal of some kind, since they are more in line with short stories, or even jokes. Your time and space are generally limited, meaning you have to deliver a setup and payoff, fast. In this case, the payoff is the super-elaborate and over the top scenes in the restroom, as compared to the sedate atmosphere in the bar. Check it out:

One filmmaker who has had a meteoric rise is Colin Trevorrow. His first short was Home Base. This led to his first indie feature the much-loved time-travel romance Sundance hit, Safety Not Guaranteed.

And that? It led to FREAKING JURASSIC WORLD (not the official title, although that would be really cool if it was).

And what did that lead to?

FREAKING STAR WARS EPISODE IX, BITCHES!!! (again, oddly, not the official title…)

The power of shorts, huh?

Sorry

Home Base is a more classical short is some ways: establishing shots, a quick set up, and an extended payoff. It’s more domestic than Battle Of The Sexes, although that could be Home Base’s subtitle, since it deals in a darkly comedic way with the fallout of a breakup. Take a look at how Trevorrow sets up his scenes, and how he uses the majority of his 8 minute running time to develop the payoff of the promise made by the guy in the first couple of lines. Fair warning: it’s completely NSFW!

These shorts are both somewhat elaborate in the way they payoff their twists. But there are other ways to do this, simpler, more low budget ways. Julia Stiles gives a brilliant performance in Neil LaBute’s short, Sexting (also probably NSFW). Here’s the trailer for it:

It’s very, very simple, one scene, mostly one take close on Stiles, and has a brilliant reveal right at the very end. It’s the reverse of Home Base — the entire short is the set-up to one quick sucker punch of a twist at the end. It’s a fantastic example of how a short can be incredibly simple — one locked off camera on one actress for one take. It’s a great way to showcase an actor (Stiles is excellent in this), and potentially an incredibly cost effective way to make a short that has real impact. It’s only available as part of the bundle of short movies called Stars In Shorts, which is available on iTunes; however, watching that bundle is highly recommended, since it contains a huge variety of different styles and approaches.

These are just a few examples of different shorts. Take some time to watch as many as you can; it’s eye-opening, inspiring, and lets you know — anything is possible. You just have to think of it.

We’ll focus on that next time: finding your story, and writing it!