Frank McCourt wrote three novels before dying last year at the age of 78.
The first one, Angela’s Ashes, narrates his miserable Irish childhood in the slums of Limmerick, the opression of his Catholic upbringing and his fight to achieve the dream of sailing to America. It won the Pulitzer Prize and it makes a thoroughly enjoyable reading (not long ago I related how I got hold of my copy).
The second one, ‘Tis, picks up at his arrival upon the new continent and tells of his search for employment, for flats, for a place in the world, for love, for a respectable career. It tries to repeat the formula but it lacks the spark and falls in nowhere land.
The third one, Teacher Man, digs in his experiences as a secondary scholl teacher of English and, for the last few years, creative writing. Both the novel and the character lack a purpose, but both seem to find it towards the last third of the book, which contains the most intense passages of the last two books and is the reason we bring it here. Both McCourt’s work and his advice are perfect matches of Brenda Ueland’s philosophy in If You Want To Write, and perfect contrast with megalomaniac storylines as we discussed them only last week.
We’re going to devote the whole of next week, Monday to Friday, to comment upon several fragments of his work and discuss, through them, the use of real experience and autobiographical elements in fiction.
Today we get a suggestion from our friend Llabrac.
I was listening to an interview with the Spanish author Jerónimo Tristante on La Rosa de los Vientos (the program from August 2nd). He believes we have been educated audiovisually, so when they tell him that his novels are very cinematic, he takes that as a compliment.
He explained that he often starts his novels, like so many American movies do, with a “seed story” that serves as an introduction to the main character. It’s a similar concept to starting in the middle of the action, but with events that are not necessarily related to the plot of the novel itself. I found it interesting and probably easier than beginnings in media res. You put a hook on the reader, introduce the characters and, after the resolution of the episode, are free to start with the novel itself.
While this is nothing new, I think it is a very good suggestion to keep in mind. Have you written anything with that structure?
“Atlas…” tells the story of four women. If I remember well (I don’t have the book at hand), each chapter has a first person narrator, though it swtitches through all four of them. If I don’t remember well, then it might be a third-person omniscient limited narrator. So let’s talk about “viewpoint character”, which fits both situations. One way or the other, we have something to learn here, from somebody else’s mistakes.
The problem was that characters did not identify themselves at the beginning of each chapter, so you had no idea who was speaking now. The idea was, I presume, that one doesn’t call oneself by name when one thinks. The reader should be able to identify the narrator by context. Well, call me stupid, but I was unable. All four women were interchangeable to me, because I never had the time to learn each other’s traits before I was mixing them all up. I never finished the book.
George R. R. Martin has created an absurdly large cast for his “A Song of Ice and Fire“, but at least each chapter is headed by the name of the viewpoint character, so at least you know who it’s referring to, which is about the lowest level of comprehension you need. If you have forgotten who it is due to the excess of names or because he hasn’t turned up for five hundred pages, well that’s an entirely different matter.
So you see where I’m heading to, right?
A writer spends many months, normally years, developing characters and plots for their novel, until they become more familiar than their family. Readers, however, will rarely dive so deep, and might even let days or weeks pass between reading one chapter and the week, or even worse, between paragraphs. It’s not like we have to spell everything out for them: readers like to be treated like intelligent creatures. But sometimes a minimum amount of redundancy can be healthy: we don’t like to be treated like we have nothing else to do with our lives apart from learning your characters’ family trees. As usual, balance is the key, and the key to balance is craft and intuition.
I’m writing a story centered around two antagonical characters. All the narration is in first person from the perspective of each of them, and a doubt arises: one of the characters is quite pedantic, should this be reflected in the segments narrated from his point of view? In other words, even if the narration is first person, can -or should- his expression depart from his personality so that -for example in this case- the narration is not unpleasant due to the way he is? Would that be coherent even if character and narrator are the same one?
What you suggest cannot be done*. A character:
cannot be two characters
cannot have two ways of expressing himself
cannot soften his discourse just so that the reader likes him
Having said that, a character:
may want to appear tougher than he really is
may be disliked by other narrators, who would portray him as worse than he really is
may have a split personality
may evolve from unsufferablee to loveble through his experiences within the story
may try to be nice to the person to whom he is telling his story, in order to get their favour (explicit reader)
does not need to be likeable (see Lolita)
In other words: *What you suggest cannot be done… without a justification within the story.
I’ve mentioned Scriptshadow in the past, so I won’t introduce Carson Reeves again. Last Monday he reviewed the script for Vanishing On 7th Street, a horror film whose trailer is already available:
As you can see, everybody disappears form the face of the earth, with the rare exception of our protagonists. There’s also something strange going on with darkness, as they can only trust the lights they carry themselves. Pure claustrophoby, and a powerful premise.
Carson starts off his review by wondering, too powerful?
The Vanishing on 7th Street is a script that starts off strong but, like a lot of these scripts, gets swallowed up in its own ambition. The ultra high-concept premise lures us in like fresh garbage to a family of raccoons. The question is, is the premise *too* high concept? Wha? Huh? Buh? ‘How can that even be possible’ you ask?? A premise is too high concept when no matter what you do with the story, it will never be as interesting as the concept itself. In other words, you bite off more than you can chew. And unfortunately, I think that’s the case with Vanishing.
The idea deserves some thought. Only last night was I talking precisely about this, as I’ve recently finished 1984 and my partner is reading Brave New World. Such classics both suffer from the same unarguable flaw: once the initial premise is exhausted, the plot grows thinner by the page.
We’ve seeen the same problem on TV, a few years ago on The 4400 (forty four hundred missing people reappear simultaneously together without aging a day or memories of the missing time) and more recently on the big flop of the season, Flashforward (every person on the planet faints simultaneously and dreams a scene of their own future exactly six months later).
Of course the concepts are powerful enough to engage the reader’s imagination (or the viewer’s, who’ll pay their cinema ticket or sit in front of the TV every week, willing to witness the grand show) – but is it not a pity that, by starting with the climax, we all end up disappointed?
If the concept that sends your story into motion is the best thing about your script, then you only have one-fourth of a script. What if aliens invaded our planet tomorrow? Okay, great concept. But then what? How do you keep that interesting for the 100 minutes after they invade? If you want to see how bad someone can screw this up, go rent Independence Day. Just make sure to also rent a gun, as you’ll want to shoot yourself by the midpoint. I think the key to these high concept ideas is making sure you have a story ready on the personal level after you hit your audience with the hook.
Indeed the big question is, how do I avoid that problem? With interesting characters? Through solid plotting? But of course! Shouldn’t those elements be present in every story? Yes, but we raised the bar too high for ourselves, how can I come up with an ending that’s worthy of my beginning? Well, you need to find elements that are just as powerful. Lost may have disappointed many of us towards the end, but during six seasons it managed to reinvent itself with complex characters, unexpected twists and narrative schemes of all colours and shapes. Blindness turned itself inside out by undoing a world tragedy and revealing a personal one. Masterful!
So here’s an exercise just as powerful: how would you save Vanishing on 7th Street from falling into this trap? How would you improve a book the size and importance of 1984? How would you get, out of these premises above, more than the authors who created them? Or, to present another forthcoming blockbuster, what would you do with the premise of Skyline?
Scriptwriting Tips offers daily advice in just a couple of lines, straight to the point, unlike me.
Tips are oriented to scriptwriters. In many cases the author -who has habit of being crude for the sake of impact- simply points out an overused cliché. Half the times the tips are highly arguable. But quite often good ideas come up which are useful for any writer, and every once in a while a real gem finds its way through and deserves being quoted if only for its brevity.
As an introduction, I offer a selection of the best tips from the last couple of weeks.
Good writing is when a character does something we weren’t expecting, but which makes perfect sense given everything we know about that character.
Every scene should affect the protagonist in some way, either directly or incidentally. If not, you got yourself a dud scene. Doesn’t matter if it’s the funniest, scariest, most exciting scene in the script — it needs to go.
If your characters don’t say horrible, soul-crushing things to each other during the dark point, you’re doing it wrong.
You don’t have to start in media res, but maybe you could do us all a favor and start at the not-boring part?
If only for the sake of commenting, I’ll keep posting here selections of their best advice as it gets published.
I had prepared a different topic for today, but there are bad news. I was sad went I went to bed last night after reading of the decease of Satoshi Kon. Curiously, his appearance on the blog this week follows nicely after Alan Moore y David Lynch (he’s often compared to the latter) though I wish the circumstances were happier. Kon was taken away by a pancreatic cancer at the age of 46.
Anime fans will undoubtedly know his works, which include the script for “Magnetic Rose” (the first segment in the popular Memories) and the feature-length films Perfect Blue, Millennium Actress, Tokyo Godfathers and Paprika, each of them a masterpiece. To round it up, he’s also the creator of the television series “Paranoia Agent“, one of my favourite animated shows ever.
As so much Japanese fiction, his works are not as focused on telling a story as on taking the viewer on an emotional journey, but Kon was a master in taking both approaches several steps further than the rest, with simple concepts and outrageously original developments. The most repeated lines today beautifully summarize how his death will affect Japanese fiction:
It’s not that anime will never be the same with Satoshi Kon gone. It’s now much more likely that anime will always be the same.
I had the pleasure to attend his press conference at Sitges 2006 where he presented Paprika. He announced there that it would be his last movie about the subconscious and that he would open a new cycle in his career. Unfortunately now we will never know what he could have come up with. If anything, we’ll get to see a finished version of the project he was working on, The Dream Machine (second picture). The film’s characters are all robots and it’s intended for family audiences.
Today more than ever I invite you to follow the link and get your hands on some of his works. They are bound to surprise you.
