More UnCleverness

Posted on March 13, 2012 by Richard

As a bit of a follow-up to my post the other week about dialogue (and, really, the post last week about Characterization), I’d like to point everyone over to a great piece over on io9 written by Charlie Jane Anders:

How Not to be a Clever Writer.

It touches on a lot of the points I was aiming at, and in more detail besides. It also goes for general advice on the whole craft of writing, and for anyone who’s struggling with, as Charlie Jane says eloquently, wanting “to be Joss Whedon so bad it hurts”, this is a great and useful read.

And I won’t even get into all the ways she’s totally wrong about the dramatic effectiveness of plots involving closed time-like loops [/injoke]

 

 

 

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A critical examination of the character of one Han “Nerf Herder” Solo, esq.

Posted on March 9, 2012 by Richard

Characterization is a tricky subject for many starting writers, and for more than a few experienced writers, too. It’s easy to tell people that your main character is an awesome shot, a great detective, or disarmingly charming, but it’s another thing altogether to get them to believe it. The classic advice is “show, not tell”, which shares with most examples of classic advice the essential quality of being succinctly accurate and nearly useless.

Because, yes, everyone can recognize that having other characters (or the description) flat-out tell the audience about some quality the lead possesses is ineffective writing, it doesn’t mean that a contrived and obvious bit of action intending to “show” some quality is going to be the bee’s knees of great writing. Building a character’s traits and qualities into their reactions to events that flow together in a natural way is not a particularly easy task. It’s one that even veterans with decades of writing experience under their belts can flub.

A recent interview that George Lucas did with The Hollywood Reporter brought to my mind one of the best examples of the trickiness of effective characterization: Han Solo and Greedo in the Mos Eisley Cantina.

Now, hang on a  moment; before any of you click away with a “oh, lord, he’s going to start being geeky about Star Wars, ughhh”, please understand: I am not going to rant about George Lucas altering Star Wars. I do not consider the Special Edition changes to have done anything to my childhood, nor do I think the prequels are any sort of blasphemy, nor do would I ever compare Mr Lucas to any particular mythological entities of elemental evil. I am, not to put to fine a point on it, not that sort of geek. I’m not even going to get into the claims he’s making about “original intent”, aside from saying that I think it’s awesome the way a 68-year-old man can troll half of the entire internet.

No, rather, one of Mr Lucas’ statements in that interview –that “Greedo shooting first” was the way the scene had always intended to be played, and that his alterations were simply “clearing up the confusion”- got me thinking about how the scene serves the characterization of everyone’s favorite smuggler. Continue reading →

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Clever vs Honest

Posted on March 2, 2012 by Richard

I am currently in the process of adapting a Shakespeare play into a short film idea we’ve been developing, and one of the most interesting bits (to me, at least) is working out the dialogue.

Shakespeare, of course, was a master of dialogue. The plays are almost entirely dialogue (or monologue, which is just a character talking to themselves), and it’s always tempting to simply exult in the turns of phrase and wordplay that he brought to the English language. It can be especially tempting to pay tribute to it all within the dialogue of the adaptation, but I’m trying to avoid that. Partially, my effort is because I honestly feel that it’s a trap to try to be clever and expository in dialogue. Fitting in as much cleverness and information into a character’s mouth as possible might seem like great writing, but it can also be a painfully obvious bit of The Author sticking into the reality of the story. Much like an event that only logically happens right then because the plot demands it happens right then, Clever Dialogue can sit on a good script like a lead brick, dragging the audience out of the experience and reminding them that Someone Wrote This. Continue reading →

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Researching Happiness

Posted on February 24, 2012 by Junie

This week I started reading the book “The Happiness Project” by Grechen Rubin as part of a research project. This particular research project had been sitting on the back burner since I made the initial notes for it four years ago, and interestingly, “The Happiness Project” was one of the books I’d planned to pick up back then, so the fact that this was the first one of the many books I’m reading on or around this subject is not just because it was in the special display at the book store.

I’m very much a cynic when it comes to reading books about “how to be happy”.  Some people need them (the books are cheaper than getting a therapist), but I’ve never thought I was one of those people and now, after a bit of reading, I’m sure I’m not one of those people.

The books is set up with important topics/resolutions that she chose to tackle on a monthly basis.  In the first 100 pages I’ve already identified with a number of key points: The life crisis that lead me to  put myself and my family first has already come and gone for me.  I walked away from one career to develop another where I’m very content.  I’ve learned how to love my husband even with his flaws, and to minimize my tendencies that can drive him crazy.  My husband and I rarely ever go to bed angry, and we know that when we argue we really aren’t arguing – we are traveling to the same place, just taking slightly different routes.   Start a Blog to introduce novelty and challenge in your work (and although you are reading the MHP version, I also have one I started back I 2008 http://juniehildebrandt.blogspot.com/).  Overall, I love a challenge and see failure as a learning experience – which may my key to happiness.

I know I am very fortunate to be in such a “happy place”.  Rubin’s book wouldn’t be so popular if people already knew what I know.   In my life I haven’t consciously been trying to be “happy”, I’ve just looked for a way to deal with problems.  I have 200 more pages to go in this book and about 2000 more if you count the rest of the books in my project – plenty of good stuff for more posts!

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Warner Brothers screws around with distribution, again.

Posted on February 9, 2012 by Richard

So, Warner Bros recently decided that, apparently, it was just too flipping easy for customers to get the chance to pay WB to see their movies when and how they wanted to.

I’m simplifying that unfairly, of course, but that’s largely the gist. From the Los Angeles Times:

Under a new deal between the two companies, Netflix users won’t just have to wait 56 days to rent Warner Bros. movies on DVD. They’ll have to wait 28 days to add the movies to their queues. [...]

Beginning Feb. 1, when the new agreement goes into effect, Netflix customers won’t even be able to add Warner movies to their queues until four weeks after the DVDs go on sale, a knowledgeable person not authorized to speak publicly confirmed. They would then have to wait another four weeks until Netflix starts shipping the discs.

Logically, Warner Bros clearly felt that they don’t get enough revenue from Netflix and Redbox (and, really, that’s completely understandable), and had a feeling that potential customers who really, really, really want to see a movie the instant it is released on DVD or digitally, would quite clearly love to utilize avenues that provide WB with better revenue (such as DVD sales or direct pay-per-view), if only there wasn’t that pesky Netflix and Redbox there letting them rent-or-stream the movie after only a few weeks of waiting.

So, did WB decide to combat this lack of traffic to their better-revenue-generating sources by enhancing the customer experience of those sources?  Or by leveraging the popularity of their titles alongside the tricky market that Netflix, and to a lesser extent Redbox, are always in to renegotiate better rates from the rental places?

No, no, of course not.  WB decided to make it more difficult for customers to find its titles, even when those titles aren’t technically available via the rental places yet.  Continue reading →

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