Posts Tagged ‘plot’

A Writing Observation from the Glee Pilot

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

Hulu has the pilot up for a new tele­vi­sion show, Glee, that I noticed some buzz about on Twitter. This past week, Sarah and I gave it a watch and really enjoyed it. Despite the fact that I’m not that inter­ested in musi­cals usu­ally, the show man­aged to grab me with its really unusual cast of characters.

Nearly every char­ac­ter has some­thing weird and unlik­able about them. No every­men or women in this show. Our teacher who restarts the Glee Club, osten­si­bly our main pro­tag­o­nist, is in a ter­ri­ble mar­riage, longs for the days when he was in Glee Club in high school, and in order to con­vince a teen to join the club, plants drugs in his locker and pre­tends to bust him, offer­ing him a choice of deten­tion or Glee Club. All of the teach­ers are sim­i­larly flawed, but with lik­able traits as well.

Some of the stu­dent cast are fairly two dimen­sional, but the two teen lead char­ac­ters are very mixed as well. The girl is lit­er­ally insane, but sym­pa­thetic for being picked on so badly by her class­mates (despite hav­ing accused the for­mer Glee Club teacher of being gay because he didn’t give her the part she wanted). The boy is a jock who par­tic­i­pates in tor­tur­ing the teens lower on the social hier­ar­chy of high school, includ­ing the other kids in the Glee Club.

As I watched the show, com­pletely riv­eted, I asked myself what was it about the show that had my atten­tion, and I decided it had to be these will­ing­ness to make its lead char­ac­ter com­plete ass­holes. Most sit­coms would never dare to make char­ac­ters so bor­der­line unlik­able. The last TV show I can remem­ber doing this well was Arrested Development. What is it about Fox that they’re will­ing to do this? Say what you will about these guys, but they gen­er­ally are will­ing to take risks on shows that none of the other net­works will?

I think it’s pos­si­ble that sim­ply unlik­able char­ac­ters would not be enough to get my atten­tion. It’s that com­bi­na­tion of sit­com with unlik­able char­ac­ters that seems to work here. The show plays with your expec­ta­tions about sit­com char­ac­ters, and while it’s obvi­ously not the first to do so, I thought it was inter­est­ing, and that I would share it with you all.

What do you think about this tech­nique? It seems like it would be much harder to pull off in a short story, where the pres­sure to have a sym­pa­thetic pro­tag­o­nist right away is fairly high. Do you know of any sto­ries or nov­els that suceeded with this tac­tic for you? Mentioning your own sto­ries if they’re pub­lished is cool too. I’d like to study the idea more.

I’ll be talk­ing quite a bit about writ­ing for the screen this week. Up later (no pun intended) will be some lessons about writ­ing that I’ve gleaned from watch­ing Pixar films, includ­ing the lat­est, er, Up. I con­sider Pixar to be some of the best sto­ry­tellers work­ing in any medium, and I think they have a lot to teach us about telling broadly acces­si­ble sto­ries.  If you’re won­der­ing if you should go see Up, and you liked ear­lier films, don’t even hes­i­tate.  See the next show you can make time for.  It’s that good.

Five (and One Silly) Ideas For Avoiding the Paradox of Choice in Writing

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

I have often writ­ten about a con­cept pio­neered by Barry Schwartz called the para­dox of choice.  Basically, the idea is that the more choices you give peo­ple, the more likely they are to be par­a­lyzed with inde­ci­sion.  It’s eas­ier to make up you mind when you have fewer choices.   In yesterday’s post, C.S. Inman asked the fol­low­ing question:

When I begin a story, I do a good job with char­ac­ter­i­za­tion, with set­ting up engag­ing con­flicts, with pos­si­bil­i­ties for com­pounded prob­lems and solu­tions. From what they tell me, peo­ple gen­er­ally want to keep turn­ing pages.

Unfortunately, when I’m writ­ing past the “begin­ning” I have dif­fi­culty choos­ing which plot options should take up those sub­se­quent pages. The “mid­dles” of my sto­ries are a cross­roads where I feel like no mat­ter which path I let the pro­tag­o­nist take, I’m miss­ing some­thing bet­ter on one of the other paths. It doesn’t help when I some­times fin­ish a short story (or a chap­ter of a novel) and real­ize I have to delete 2,000 words and go a dif­fer­ent direc­tion because it’s totally awe­some, and how didn’t I see it before I wasted all that time?

Do you have any ideas about how I can either 1. Stop being a pansy and just pick one and like it or 2. Discover which path is going to be the most sat­is­fy­ing BEFORE I write the wrong one?

First of all, don’t be dis­cour­aged by this. The para­dox of choice hap­pens to every­one. I can’t tell you how many times I have stood in front of the fridge and stared at the con­tents right after shop­ping, unable to make up my mind what to cook.  In writ­ing, it’s no dif­fer­ent. What’s hap­pen­ing here is that you’re com­ing to a point where you have too many choices about the direc­tion your story can take. The key  is to nar­row down your choices, and to do so in a way that you make deci­sions and choices about the direc­tion of your story that result in a good story.  Here are a some ideas to help you do this:

  1. First of all, keep in mind that there’s no “best” solu­tion. You’ll like one more than another one day, and the next day, you’ll think the oppo­site. It’s of course all very sub­jec­tive. So relax about it and just get your first draft out. As other ideas occur to you, keep a par­al­lel doc­u­ment run­ning, and jot down your alter­na­tive paths that come to you. After your first or sec­ond draft, go back and see if explor­ing any of those notions will be any better.
  2. It can help some­times to not only have a begin­ning to a story when you start writ­ing, but to also have an idea of an end­ing. I used to think this was impos­si­ble for me to do, but the more I write now, the more I real­ize that most sto­ries only have a few sat­is­fy­ing end­ings avail­able to them once you know the setup. It’s much harder to write a story in which the pro­tag­o­nist fails at suc­ceed­ing against their cen­tral story prob­lem. It’s not impos­si­ble, but you need to know you’re going to do that when you set out writ­ing the story, because there has to be some sat­is­fac­tion to the reader in their failure–they have to suc­ceed at some­thing greater, some­thing they didn’t even nec­es­sar­ily know they wanted–but the reader should have had an inkling along the way even if the pro­tag­o­nist did not. Foreshadowing is much eas­ier to do if you know what you’re fore­shad­ow­ing. You can always write to the end and then go back and add the fore­shad­ow­ing in in a later draft, or–
  3. Maybe you shouldn’t think of those 2,000 words you cut as wasted. Some writ­ers (not many) can write a story in a sin­gle draft, and make minor edits, then send it off and sell it. Me, I have found that I write any­where from 3–10 drafts of a story before I get it accepted some­where. Without fail, the more drafts I put into a story, the more I stand a chance of suc­ceed­ing in my ulti­mate goal, which is see­ing the story pub­lished. The key here is to adjust your expec­ta­tions and to give your­self room to exper­i­ment. The 2,000 words that don’t make it into a final draft of the story can be just as impor­tant, if not more impor­tant, than the ones that do.
  4. There’s a gen­eral rule of thumb that’s often offered as writ­ing advice, which is, when you need to make a deci­sion like a char­ac­ter aspect, or a plot ele­ment, you should not go with your first notion. Or your sec­ond. Or even you third. It some­times takes push­ing past the first sev­eral ideas that come to mind because the ideas that most eas­ily come to mind are typ­i­cally cliches. Even if you at first don’t think they are, keep push­ing for an alter­na­tive anyway.Try writ­ing a story in which each time you need to make a deci­sion, before writ­ing, you come up with three ideas, and dis­card the first two you think of. See where that leads you.
  5. When faced with which direc­tion to take with your plot, I some­times go with a pretty sim­ple rule: which direc­tion will be more wildly fun? If you’re more of a lit­er­ary bent, I sup­pose you could choose which direc­tion will more prop­erly illus­trate the theme or explore the nature of your char­ac­ter. Stop and con­sider your deci­sions in light of what your goal in telling the story is. Whichever direc­tion will raise the stakes the most with­out being ridicu­lous. You can’t risk the world or the uni­verse in every sin­gle story, but you can almost always raise the stakes more than you think. Higher stakes often lead to a much more com­pelling story.
  6. If all else fails, you can always flip a coin! Or roll a die. I will admit to hav­ing rolled the dice lit­er­ally when hav­ing trou­ble mak­ing a deci­sion about a story. Hey, it works in RPGS, right?

Ultimately, I think a com­bi­na­tion of all of the above can be put to use. I’m just going to guess here, but I sus­pect Inman is not an out­line writer. I started out writ­ing sto­ries with­out an out­line, and actu­ally, many of my sales were writ­ten with­out one. Now, I almost always out­line and write pretty exten­sive world build­ing notes before I start the story. It’s pos­si­ble that sim­ply mak­ing the switch to writ­ing from an out­line, even for some­thing as short as a short story, will solve this prob­lem for you. Either way, enjoy it the process. It’s a huge part of what makes writ­ing so much damned fun.

If you have a ques­tion about any of the areas I write about here on the blog, or even areas I don’t, add them to this post from yes­ter­day. You can win a copy of Federations, the new anthol­ogy edited by John Joseph Adams con­tain­ing my story “The Culture Archivist.” I’ll be tak­ing sug­ges­tions on that post until Friday, and will declare the win­ner on Monday. There have been some great ques­tions so far, and I look for­ward to hear­ing more.