As the rewrite/polish of the mystery-comedy continues, it suddenly hit me that while I knew the backstory of what came before, somebody reading it for the first time would have no idea what was going on, or at least how we got here.
A little exposition was in order.
But among the many problems with writing exposition is when it’s out-and-out obvious.
“You mean your brother John, who went through a terrible divorce, ran off to join the circus and became a cross-dressing serial killer?”
Sometimes it’s done very effectively, but unfortunately, a lot of the time it isn’t, resulting in a blast of information crammed into one scene.
No thanks.
Rather than go down that road, I’m exploring the potential of doling out the details over several scenes. A sentence or two casually placed here and there so as to not draw attention to itself, all for the purpose of helping you learn where everything is coming from and how we got here.
It’s a work in progress, so we’ll see how it goes.
Not just the villain, but a key part of the whole story
So you’ve got your protagonist’s story planned all the way through. Beginning to end. You know what they want and what they need. That character arc is firmly in place.
What about your antagonist?
Have you put as much effort into developing their story? Do you explain why they’re doing this? What do they seek to gain from their actions?
A lot of the time, the bad guy is the more interesting character, so why wouldn’t you make just as much of an effort on fleshing them out?
The character we identify as the villain should see themselves as the hero of their story, with your protagonist the one standing in their way of achieving their goal.
Maybe there’s a previously-existing connection between the two, which can be gradually revealed as the story progresses.
How often has a writer explained the “why” behind the antagonist with a casual “Because they’re bad”? Readers and audiences want a little more depth than that.
This isn’t saying you need to come up with an extensive backstory about their past and what led them down this path. A few lines of dialogue can be just the thing to provide the reason why they’re doing this.
You’ve already spent a lot of time developing your hero’s journey. It only makes sense to do the same for the villain.
A slightly altered holiday work schedule has resulted in more hours on the air, which is always nice, but less time cranking out pages, which isn’t.
So I make the most of the handful of minutes between reports with the always-reliable working on an outline. This time – the monster script.
Despite knowing the general playing-out of the story, there was something that wasn’t clicking. Most of the items on my mental checklist had been checked off.
Most. Not all. What was missing?
It took the constant back-and-forth between the opening sequences of the two previous outlines to make me realize what it was: I’d never fully established what happened before the story started.
Not knowing how everything came about was preventing me from moving forward. I had to create this world before I could write about it.
Think of the opening crawl in STAR WARS (“It is a period of civil war. Rebel spaceships, etc. etc…”). It establishes what we need to know. Without it, we’d be too busy trying to figure things out.
Using that as an example, I worked out my own version of the opening crawl. It won’t be in the actual script, but it’s a pretty solid foundation for setting things up – a better realization of how this world works, what the antagonist wants and how that can be accomplished, the challenges the protagonist faces, just to name a few.
The work on this is far from being over, but developing this really helped. Some important blanks have been filled in and I’ve got a firmer grasp of how the story works.
Time now to start the latest version of the outline and see how it goes.
-Regarding the recent release of this year’s Black List. There appear to be a handful that sound pretty good, but the rest don’t really do much for me.
No doubt they’re all extremely well-written (why else would they be on the list?), but a majority don’t have that “Read me!” vibe. It probably doesn’t help that the writers are not the ones providing the loglines. I suspect that would make quite a difference.
This slightly expository scene is practically wafer-thin. What harm could it do?
The rewrite continues, with some of the suggested changes being implemented.
Some, not all.
I take each suggestion into heavy consideration. First and foremost – will it make the story better?
There’s no argument about some of them. They work, and that’s it.
There are the ones that are “maybe”. Purely optional.
Fortunately, there aren’t any that are straight-out “no”.
It’s the ones that suggest going into more detail (tell us more about this world you’ve created, explain why a character acts like they do, etc.) that are giving me pause.
I understand the reasoning behind this, but my concern is putting in too much information that it bogs down the whole thing. I’m as much for explaining things as much as the next writer, but I don’t want to overdo it.
I’d much rather leave a little to the audience’s imagination, rather than bombarding them with why things are happening.
Think of it this way: the flux capacitor makes time travel possible. Do you need to know how it works?
I suspect my subconscious creativeness let it’s two cents be known by coming up with a wonderfully bad joke to explain something. My initial response is to take it out, but it may actually be just what the scene needs.
-Movie of the Moment – The trailer for the next Percy Jackson movie came out earlier this week (hitting theatres in August), so now V is splitting her time between reading the book it’s based on and watching PERCY JACKSON AND THE LIGHTNING THIEF (2010) again.
I don’t have anything against the movie. It’s adequate popcorn fare with excessive CG (which this kind of story couldn’t be told without), and V likes it. The more I think about it, the whole franchise just feels like a semi-successful attempt to be the next Harry Potter.
We also checked out the trailer for PACIFIC RIM, which has growing potential to be a family outing to our local theatre this summer.
Maximum Z 