Narrative Efficiency …

… and a reason why you should clean out your Inbox.

I was just going through all my “starred” g-mail items, and came across one that my wife e-mailed me 2 months ago, which contained a link to Validation by Kurt Kuenne, which I still hadn’t gotten around to watching. Putting aside the message, which is a whole conversation unto itself, I just love the narrative efficiency.

Consider: In scene 1, somebody comes up to our hero, and he validates him. The scene is roughly a minute long. In scene 2, a woman comes up and he validates her – this one only takes about 15 seconds. Cut to someone running. “There’s a problem,” he says. And they go to this guy, and there’s a line out the door for people waiting for parking. We’ve just skipped months, and it only took two minutes to establish the premise, then the pattern, and then result.

The stakes continue to go up just as quickly. By the end of the third minute, he’d solved peace in the Middle East. Which left me wondering where on earth they could possibly go from here.

But of course, it moves brilliantly forward by giving him an obstacle he can’t overcome, and then the classical “ordeal,” followed by the “Dark Night of the Soul” where he pulls out of his low-point, and then the resolution. Thorough, complete, riveting, and only 15 minutes long. Fantastic!

10% Inspiration, 90% Marketing – Books & Modern Media

People hate technology. They really do.

Of course, this is a vast generalization, and really what I mean is that businesspeople hate technology. But even that’s not true, because plenty of businesspeople out there embrace it and use it for exactly its intended purpose – to provide a new way of providing something consumers want, and in exchange, receiving monetary profit.

Which means that it’s not that businesspeople hate technology, it’s that business-dinosaurs hate technology, because they’re too blind to realize that change is inevitable, so they should embrace it and figure out a way to incorporate it into their business model.

And for some reason, well-established artists seem to be least creative when it comes to inventing ways to take advantage of technology, because they’re so incredibly stuck in the old paradigm of Intellectual Property. I wrote about this several months ago, and as a self-published author of a fantastic book who’s completely loused up the marketing process, it’s something I think about quite often.

In response to how much easier it is to copy and distribute art today than it was even 10 years ago, an organization called Creative Commons has created a “some rights reserved” license, a.k.a. the Creative Commons license, which lets the copyright-owner choose the conditions upon which copying and redistribution are permitted.

By now, most people are aware, at least vaguely, of the existence of the Creative Commons license. Many, I suspect, still haven’t seriously considered using it. Why? Because using this license requires throwing out all the books you’ve read that tell you how to break into the business. It requires a D.I.Y. approach to publishing, and it requires trusting that if you give someone something for free, the money will flow in your direction. Stephen King tried this approach nine years ago, and it was ultimately unsuccessful. Fair enough – he’s already got a model that works for him.

But Cory Doctorow recently published a column in Publisher’s Weekly about how he’s done exactly that. Here’s someone who clearly has no problem coming up with ingenuitive ways of marketing his work, and has reaped the rewards as a result.

I think we can all learn a lesson from Cory Doctorow, Diablo Cody, Stephen Elliott, and the other mad artists working in the world of modern technology. Come up with something new, and dedicate your time to it.

Because the more time I spend in this business, the more I realize that there are few things harder than finishing a book – but marketing that book happens to be one of them.

Narrative Nonfiction – Where to Start

I received the following e-mail the other day:

I was approached by a friend of a friend to help her write her story about <specifics edited out>. It is an intriguing story. My experience and previous publications are technical, business, and romance. Any suggestions on a good place to start with what I believe should be classified as narrative non-fiction?

Like anything else, I think the place to start is with the structure. Spend an hour or two with this woman, get really absorbed into the story, and then try to figure out how to organize it on a chapter-by-chapter basis. Once you know what each chapter is about, plugging in the details should be pretty easy.

I will say that one of the dangers of narrative non-fiction is that it turns into a “this happened, then this happened, then this happened” kind of sequence, which you want to avoid. To maximize its potential, the structure should look remarkably like a fiction story – turning point, progressively more-challenging obstacles to overcome, rise to a climax (that seems impossible to overcome), and then overcome it and finish quickly.

A great example of this is Crashing Through by Robert Kurson – about a guy who was blinded by chemical burns at the age of three, and went on to serve in the CIA and break Olympic downhill skiing records, before undergoing a corneal stem cell transplant surgery at the age of 45 that gave him his sight back. The amazing part of the story is the struggle he went through after the surgery to try to see normally.

I got this book when I was researching for a project about an athlete who had to overcome a physical disability. I’d definitely recommend doing the same thing – find a narrative nonfiction book that’s in the same “subgenre” as the one you’re looking to write. It will help give you ideas in the best way to tell your story.

Review of Stephen King’s Under the Dome

The full review of Stephen King’s Under the Dome is now available.

Stephen King’s Top 7 Tips for Becoming a Better Writer

As I was tooling around, trying to figure out a way to drum up some buzz on Stephen King’s soon-to-be-released book, Under the Dome (which I’m currently about two-fifths of the way through), I came across this old post on Stephen King’s Top 7 Tips for Becoming a Better Writer.

Stephen King’s Under the Dome

I just got back from a meeting, where I acquired an advance reading copy of Stephen King’s new book, Under the Dome.  I was told by the rep who gave it to me that I’m one of the first people in the world to hold a copy of this book.

Watch this space for a full review in the coming weeks.

15 Movies

Rules: Don’t take too long to think about it. Fifteen movies you’ve seen that will always stick with you. First fifteen you can recall in no more than fifteen minutes. Tag fifteen friends, including me because I’m interested in seeing what movies my friends choose.

To do this, go to your Notes tab on your (Facebook) profile page, paste rules in a new note, cast your fifteen picks, and tag people in the note — upper right hand side. I hope you participate, even if you didn’t get tagged!

1. Th Shawshank Redemption
2. The Usual Suspects
3. The Dark Knight
4. High Fidelity
5. Natural Born Killers
6. Grosse Point Blank
7. Moulin Rouge!
8. Juno
9. The Princess Bride
10. Seven Pounds
11. Chasing Amy
12. The Crow
13. Dave
14. Don Juan de Marco
15. What the Bleep do We Know?

Who’s Your Hero?

We finally got there.

As you may or may not know, I’m taking an improv class on narrative longform – that’s improv that tells a story, as distinct from shortform improv (the kind you see on Whose Line Is It Anyway?) or what I call montage-style longform (where there’s no narrative throughline, you just do one long show with random scenes).  And after several weeks of scenework, this week’s class was all about establishing the hero.

Think of some stories you like, and then answer the following question: How do you know who’s the hero?  This was one of our exercises, and the results we came up with were not surprising:

• He’s the person the story is named after.
• He’s the person we’re rooting for.
• He changes over the course of the story.
• He’s the person making the most active decisions.
• He appears in more scenes than anyone else.
• Any scenes he’s not in are there to support his story.
• He’s got the biggest obstacle to overcome.

Then we set out creating scenes in which we established, as early as possible, who the hero is.  One of the guidelines I’ve established for myself is that whoever’s first to appear on stage, on screen, or on the page, is more often than not the hero.  There are exceptions to that rule, but usually those exceptions exist to establish the tone (Hamlet), or as part of a broader scene to establish the need for the hero (The Dark Knight), who is often then be the first to appear on screen after the scene is over.  Interestingly, an early draft of the Star Wars script has Luke Skywalker first appearing somewhere around the 4th minute – not really doing much, just showing up all by his lonesome to show us, the reader, that he’s the person we’re meant to be following.

Thoughts on The Soloist

Don’t you hate it when you’re so looking forward to a movie that you end up disappointed when you finally see it?

Don’t get me wrong, The Soloist was good, I think.  Jamie Foxx and Robert Downey, Jr. were characteristically outstanding, and it was all terribly emotional and realistic and sad.  And the film economy was great – all the boring parts got skipped (a great example: no need to see Downey calling LAMP to find a place to store the cello – he just does it off-screen, and we see the impact of that decision.) But I felt like it didn’t really go anywhere.  The big arc is that he decides to be the guy’s friend … somewhat anticlimactic.  But at the same time, terribly sweet and understated and appropriate, especially given that it’s a drama and a true story and all that.

The Problem-Solution Mass

I was watching my favorite part of Moulin Rouge! the other day – basically, the elephant scenes.  I noticed a very interesting pattern:

They introduce a problem, then they solve it.  Then, as soon as that one is solved, they introduce another problem, and then they solve that.  Lather, rinse, repeat, for about 20-25 minutes.  Behold:

Problem	Outcome/Solution
Satine and Christian are in the elephant for different reasons. She wants to seduce him, and he wants to inspire her with his poetry.	She fakes an orgasm for a while, until he bursts into song and makes her fall in love with him.
She realizes he’s not the Duke, freaks out, and then the Duke shows up while he’s still in there.	They run around for a while, trying to divert him, until they finally get him out of the room. Then …
Satine passes out, and the Duke returns to get his hat, only to discover her in the arms of another man.	The emergency rehearsal! Generally, the Duke likes it.
While everyone else is celebrating, Christian tries to write, but all he can think about is Satine.	He goes to visit her, while she’s lamenting and dreaming.
She’s not allowed to fall in love. But a life without love, that’s terrible!	He sings for her again. She falls in love again. He’s going to be bad for business, she can tell.

My favorite part of Robert McKee’s Story is that story happens in the gap between expectation and result.  Any time you think you know – or even more critically, any time the characters think they know – what’s going to happen, we need to throw them a curve ball, which they then need to figure out how to solve.  That’s done here in spades, and this happens to be one of my favorite movie sequences – I’ve watched Moulin Rouge! in its entirety maybe four or five times, but I’ve watched that sequence closer to four or five dozen.

Of course, there are a lot of other things going on here, than just the problem-solution mass.  It’s also visually stunning, outstandingly well-choreographed, hilariously funny, and thematically brilliant.  Plus, Nicole Kidman is hot.

But we could all stand to take a page from Moulin Rouge! and introduce more problems into our screenplays that our characters have to solve.