Pay As You Go

Maybe you shouldn’t outline after all?

Justine Larbalestier in her blog at http://justinelarbalestier.com/blog/?p=398 has some good advice on writing novels for would-be novelists.

Among her notes is that writers who are not veterans ought not outline. ‘Make it up as you go along,’ she advises, until you have written a few novels, and can then rely upon your experience to decide whether an outline is a process that would help you or hinder you.

And I must say this sounds sensible.

Only to add these notes:

1. Pay as you go, or make it up as you go, will often lead to dead ends, as even the veteran pulp author Leigh Brackett found in her career. Therefore I would advise everyone who pays as they go, to pay it out till the bitter end, even if it is crap, even if it won’t work, even if it hurts.
   (Brackett was not in your position; she knew the racket, and she needed to be paid for each page she pulled out of her typewriter. If she knew the story was unpublishable, as she would know, being a pro, she also knew that it would only be a waste of her time and paper to go on with it. You can’t know that until you’ve sold a hundred or so short stories and a couple dozen novels.)
2. If you do hit a blank wall, then the best approach I have found is to bash your head against it until it breaks (your head or the wall). Nine times out of ten it’s the wall that will break. But sometimes it’s your head. In that instance, glue your skull back into place and outline what you have done so far.
   (This outline will give you a bit of perspective on what you have done and will, maybe, show you the weak chink in the wall that your busted head just might crack through.)

As for No. 2 above, Ms Larbalestier seems to concur, as she advises outlining the complete first draft in a spreadsheet (something the ‘Snowflake Method for Writing a Novel’ advises before writing the first draft). She does not address the issue of the Gordian Knot problem, of the wall that broke your skull.

But the all-time Golden Rule for talesmen (and all artists for that matter) is:

Whatever works for you is the thing you ought to do, until it stops working. Then try something else.

Words to live and tell tales by.

(Composed on keyboard Monday, June 30, 2008)

What Do Readers Want?

A ripping engrossing yarn

Once upon a time, the tale was the only form of lie that was made to entertain us. There were no plays, and songs that told lies were tales, after all. The entertaining lie was made up, then, of words.

Today, novels, short stories, and what falls between, are the descendants of this tradition. But today, along with these lies told with words, we can amuse ourselves with lies told with images, and interactive sights and sounds, and recorded plays.

Each of these forms of lies must, therefore, satisfy whatever is our basic need for entertaining lies, and must do so in its own best-suited way.

In some countries, literacy and reading tales is unsurpassed in history. In other countries, literacy is declining, and tales no longer hold the crown. There are movies and television and videogames, and these vie for the crown.

When, therefore, we ask the question ‘What do readers want?’ we are asking more than ‘How do tales entertain us?’ We want to know that, but we also want to know how it is that written tales in particular entertain us. What is the unique appeal of the written word to amuse, enthrall, mystify, engross, and satisfy?

I ask the question rhetorically of my readers who are talesmen. Because you know the answer, after all. All of you are readers, and all of you have chosen to devote considerable time to making your own tales, for yourself and other readers.

Why don’t you make movies instead? Why don’t you make comics?

What do you get out of a novel that no movie or comic can offer?

What is the secret delight of the soul alone with itself, in the spell of the symbol that is the word, mere squiggles of ink on the page or pixels on the screen, that opens up into a universe that surrounds and enchants?

What do readers want?

What do you want, when you read?

(Composed on keyboard Sunday, June 29, 2008)

The Well-Trod Path

There may be many ways to name a tale, but is there one ‘best way’?

Only One of Many

Yesterday, in ‘A Path Apart,’ I wrote of my friend Tim Maloney (online at http://www.nakedrabbit.com) and his novel way of considering what a tale is and how a tale comes into being.

To sum it up (as well as I ken it), Tim thinks that tale-creation actually happens in the minds of the audience, as a sort of neurological habit, or reflex, or twitch. It is, indeed, part of the way men have of apprehending their lives and experiences. An habitual method of categorizing, organizing, clumping and lumping together all the disparate, even random, events we experience. We try to ‘make sense’ of the world, and always have. So we take a series of events and put them together into a beginning, middle, and end. Or rather, as Tim would say, ‘beginning, middle, and end’ only comprise one way of organizing the events, but that all the ways of organizing events create the tale of those events.

We have several reasons for wanting to do this, and we can count several ways in which this manner of treating the world helps us. (There are also ways in which this manner of treating the world hurts us, as for example when we feel the need to explain events through the agency of some manlike God, and build authoritarian rule based upon our understanding of this God we have invented just to ‘make the story work’ of all the events we have experienced.)

By the light of this theory, the Classical Dramatic Narrative Structure, as first set forth by Aristotle, and ever since elaborated and expounded upon by a host of thinkers and talesmen, is not the only, or ‘best’ way of considering the Tale. It is only one variety of Tale, and there are many more — an infinite number of varieties, as many as there are members of all the audiences to all the tales and events that ever came to be.

But, the ‘Best’?

I was born in the West. I grew up (for the most part) on Western fiction, tales told in the tradition of Aristotle’s ‘Beginning, Middle, and End,’ or the Classical Dramatic Narrative Structure. Thus I have learned this kind of tale best, and am most accustomed to this kind of tale, and I like this kind of tale (I also like tales that don’t fit the kind, but most of those tales I find in different cultural traditions, and represent a sort of literary tourism).

So even though I might accept Tim’s concept in theory, I remain bound by my own tastes, acquired over a lifetime. And so does my audience.

Herewith, the model of a talesman out of this tradition, composing his tale:

He will begin with some ideas — a character, setting, relationship, or some such thing. He will dwell upon these ideas, and around them he will begin to discern fogs coalescing into the shape of possible tales. In a sense, at this point, the talesman is doing in reverse what an audience does when it ‘makes’ a tale out of the events that it takes as a whole. Here the talesman is seeing a character, or an isolated event, or a setting, and he is meditating upon it while the answer to the unspoken question, What tale does this belong to? slowly forms in his imagination.

This period of gestation is crucial to our concern here.

During this time, everything is potential, everything is true, and every kind and manner of tale exists around these ideas — both tales of different linking events, and different kinds of tales, most of which, if Tim’s idea be true, are not of the Classical Dramatic Narrative Structure, but a few of which are.

Now, because our talesman is born of the West and its tradition of the CDNS, and the belief that only the CDNS makes for a ‘good’ tale, or indeed a ‘proper’ tale, as he begins to winnow through these potential tales, he will cast aside all those many that do not belong to the West’s CDNS tradition, and hold on only to those that do. He will further sift through the potential CDNS candidates, feeling for which seems best to him, to be the strongest in emotional power, to move him the most, to fit in best with the CDNS.

Having settled upon one such model, our talesman will go on to knead and shape it further. In this part of the process he will also be guided by the model of the CDNS, he will try to make this tale fit the CDNS as he understands it.

In this way the talesman not only obeys the dictates of the CDNS, he also furthers its dominance. For when we in the audience hear his tale, we will find one more example of the CDNS for our entertainment, and all the power artistry and talent of the talesman will have been put to use to make this CDNS tale as entertaining and as moving as he can. This will further a tacit, not even consciously grasped, belief in us, that this is the best and only kind of tale, the ‘true and proper meaning of a tale.’

The children in the audience will hear this tale, and will enjoy it, and they will grow up on this and many other tales, all out of this tradition. So the model perpetuates itself.

So when Diana Wynne-Jones puts her hand to reshaping her tales, after feeling her way through them with as little foreplanning as possible, she will guide her thoughts according to this model of tale, when she asks herself what parts fit and what parts don’t fit, and how to make the tale better, a ‘complete and coherent whole.’

So when Leigh Brackett shelved some of her tales, begun with an opening image and no more of a plan than that, she may have been guided by the awareness that ‘this isn’t a proper tale.’ And more: she may have known, ‘no editor will buy this.’

For editors too are born into this common tradition, and regard themselves as keepers of the flame, while not even realizing, most of them, that the CDNS is not the only way a tale can be built.

(Composed on keyboard Saturday, June 28, 2008)

A Path Apart

A different concept of what makes a tale

Over at http://www.nakedrabbit.com Tim Maloney has been running a series of notes he wrote up while at the Cannes Film Festival in 2007. They really are amusing, even hilarious — I liken them to Hunter S. Thompson in his prime. Though the films he writes about are no longer new, the notes or ‘ramblings’ or even ‘ravings’ of Mr Maloney are a great boon to all of us film fans who have never gone to the festival. This is the honest-to-God experience of 90% of festival-goers, those who just love movies and don’t have limousines to take them about, or golden press passes and red carpets. I tell you, when I read these pieces, I could smell the dogshit on the streets, baking in the midi sun.

His last piece, Cannes Diary Day 9 is online at http://nakedrabbit.com/x/?p=145 and in this one Mr Maloney went beyond his usual excellence to form a couple of ‘digressions’ on first, ‘the nature of success and how it has ignored me completely,’ and second, ‘the nature of Narrative.’

It is the latter that interests me here.

In this short essay, Mr Maloney puts forth the notion that story exists in the mind of the audience, and not, primarily, in the art of the talesman. This story-begetting is not an intellectual act nor yet an act of will on our part, but is a sort of neurological twitch — a part of being human, a part of the essence of our nature. Tim does not say this, but I gather that this would tie in with the basic pattern-recognition that allows us to spot predators that would eat us, and underlies all our logic, in a way. In short this concept of narrative says that it derives from basic traits we need to survive. Not that we need tales to survive, but that we need to recognize patterns, and shape order out of the chaos of sensory details that assaults us every second we are alive; and by the way, we have created ‘stories’ out of this same impulse.

Therefore (as Tim would have it):

Narrative contains
Cinema which can encompass
Story which can be of the type we call
CDNS [Classical Dramatic Narrative Structure]

And most definitely NOT

CDNS is the perfection of
Story which is required for
Cinema

This notion goes so far beyond my own ideas of talesmanship, lamed as it is by the shadow of this ‘Classical Dramatic Narrative Structure,’ that I must offer it as an alternative to any who might take my writings too far as model.

Aristotle, then, did not come up with his famous ‘Beginning, Middle, and End’ except that this was the way his own rigorous, logical mind saw the poems and drama of his day — the only way he could see them.

The vigorous outline I recommended yesterday, in the post titled ‘The Outline,’ would not be needed at all. Diana Wynne-Jones’s way of composing is just as valid as the clockwork preparations of Upton Sinclair. Leigh Douglass Brackett’s discarded manuscripts might well have been interesting tales after all, no matter what she thought of them, no matter how deep her despair of them.

A series of events, grouped and marked off somehow, we will, perforce, shape and assemble into something like an order, a meaning, a tale. What groups or marks these events? A film begins to unreel, it projects upon a screen, the film runs out, the projection stops. The talesman begins to speak, he speaks to us, he stops. We take what we have heard, and we twitch it into order, shape.

(Composed on keyboard Friday, June 27, 2008)

The Outline

I know you hate to outline. Do it all the same.

Dream, Story, Performance

In ‘How Dull Can You Get’ a couple of days ago, I wrote about the 3 stages of composing a tale. They are:

1. Dream the setting, characters, events.
2. Structure the events into a tale.
3. Perform the structure into a finished tale for us in the audience to hear and love.

The second stage, where you structure the events and shape the characters’ squarish pegs into the roundish holes of the narrative, is where you actually coin the tale or story. The story is complete in the structure stage; what you add in the performance is the wit, the polish, and the effects of your style. In a word, you heighten the tale’s effectiveness. But the tale already exists in the outline you create when you have done with structuring the tale.

‘But I Hate to Outline!’

This is what many of us talesmen say. It’s true, I hate to outline. I think most writers do. And I expect that most of us just skim over the outline phase. Some of us, like Diana Wynne-Jones, have the barest sort of outline imaginable: she writes that she only has three scenes in her outline, which she keeps in her head: the start, the end, and one standout scene in the middle. When Ms Wynne-Jones composes her first draft, then, she sets down her starting scene, then ‘works her way’ toward the goal of that middle scene, from which she proceeds to work her way toward the end scene.

She says she ends up with a mess of a first draft, which she then works over and over to set into a coherent tale.

Other writers will do with even less of an outline than Ms Wynne-Jones. Leigh Douglass Brackett just made it up as she went along. She also ended up with many tales she had to abandon, reaching insolvable points in the story, or deciding the tale had nowhere to go at all.

Making the outline does render the act of performing the first draft less exciting, suspenseful, or surprising. The first draft sinks into more of a mechanical filling-in of details left out of the outline.

But. But. But…

If You Can’t Make an Outline, You Don’t Know Your Story

Leigh Douglass Brackett ended up often enough finding out she had no tale at all. Diana Wynne-Jones ended up with a first draft that needed an outline of its own for her to learn what story it was she had told.

Simply put: the outline is your story.

Pyramid or Less Than Useful

There are of course different sorts of outlines. The least-formed is a simple list:

• This happened at the start
• Then this happened
• Then that happened
• Meanwhile this other happened
• Then this thing happened
• Because of all this, that happened
• Finally, the end happened

This is not right. It is better than no notion at all of your tale, and it is better than the bare minimum of Ms Wynne-Jones. But it doesn’t help you to understand what story it is that you are telling.

So you really are aiming at a hierarchical, or pyramidal or top-down outline. Or a series of outlines à la the ‘Snowflake Method’ in which you summarize your tale in one sentence, then in a paragraph, then in five paragraphs, then in five pages.

You must understand what is at the heart of your tale if you are to make up your mind which scenes to include and which scenes to leave out.

In the Beginning, All Was Calm

The hero was calm

His town was calm

The people around him were as they always were

Then Something Happened that got the Hero in a Box

This happened

The hero ignored it

It got worse

The hero tried to get the town to take care of it

No good; the hero knew he was in trouble and would have to take care of it himself

The Struggle Began Badly

The hero tried something

It failed

Things got even worse

The hero tried something else

… And so on. Here I show only two levels, comparable to a summary of each sequence, and the main events within that sequence. Of course a fully ordered outline will have one Master Line that tells the whole tale, then each Act will have its line, each Sequence within the Acts will have its line, each main event will have its line, and each minor event within each main event will have its line. There may be even lower-levels than that.

The talesman who masters this sort of an outline can tell you his tale in a single line, the Master Line, easily and off the top of his head. Ask him to elaborate, and he can give you the tale in a handful of sentences, one for each act.

Thus he knows precisely what is the tale he tells.

And thus he is capable of performing that tale, rather than another tale entirely while he imagines he is telling you the tale he claims he is.

Yes, outlines are hard, and not very gratifying to most of us. They are rather like the work the painter must undergo to prepare his canvas, his brushes, his pigments, along with all his preparatory sketches. Task-work, toil, drudgery. But if the painter neglects this (as unhappily many 20th century artists did) then his masterpieces will fall to pieces in a few years.

Do it right if you want to build a tale that can last.

(Composed on keyboard Thursday, June 26, 2008)

Sympathy For the Devil

When we deny others their humanity, we run the risk of losing our own

Last night I watched Downfall — a few years ago, there was a documentary interview with a woman who had been a secretary for Hitler for the last 3 years, and was in the bunker with him right to the end. This inspired some filmmakers to make a drama version of it — that is Downfall.

The movie stars Bruno Ganz as Hitler. He was the lead angel in city of angels. Can you imagine him as Hitler? He was good though — astonishingly good. Easily the best Hitler I have ever seen.

I stopped reading the subtitles when he was on screen. I just had to watch him with his movements, his looks — he was great.

But while I was watching it, I became aware of how this war was truly a new stage in war at least in european history (I’m sure it already happened in China thousands of years ago, when everything happened of one kind or another).

In Europe’s past, in war, one nation sees it is going to lose, and it negotiates peace terms with the winner. Maybe money is paid, or territory is lost, or new treaties are signed to the advantage of the winner. The leaders go on ruling their countries.

WW2 was the first ‘total war’ as they call it. Even though in Europe WW2 was fought over economic and territorial disputes, the Nazi leaders saw it as ideological, ‘proof’ that they were superior, when they won. In the end in the bunker (according to Downfall), Hitler couldn’t fathom that he had lost, he kept expecting some miracle to save him from the russians, who were all round berlin and closing in. And Hitler was adamant: No surrender! He killed himself, lots of them killed themselves. The survivors tried to negotiate terms, but (again according to the movie) the Russians insisted on total surrender, even as the US insisted from Japan.

After the war we had the show trials, with new laws invented just to be able to claim it was legitimate to execute or imprison the former leaders.

But what is truly sad is that in the eyes of the US at least, Hitler, the Japanese leaders, all the top Nazis, were no longer human. They were subhuman, monsters, devils.

This way of thinking leads to two results. The first, immediate result, is to remove any scruple in killing the enemy leaders — something that had not been done in European warfare, was indeed equated in Europe with barbarism, something ‘Christians’ were too ‘civilized’ ever to contemplate. Ethically, it was still uncomfortable to simply invent new laws and then hang people because you say they violated laws that didn’t even exist when they did those things; but if those people were inhuman monsters, then there was no ethical objection.

Another immediate result was suspicion of German and Japanese people. What had gone wrong with them, why did they just go along with those monsters, there must be something inhuman about all Germans and Japanese. This, of course is only to repeat the racism that the western powers accused the Nazis and Japanese of.

It would be something else to say, ‘I am so pissed and dismayed that you guys destroyed my country, I am going to go crazy and kill you all!’ That must have been in the hearts of most Russians, after the dreadful losses they had sustained. That is not totally ‘civilized’ but it is human. There is something calculated and hypocritical and wrong about saying, ‘No hard feelings, we are just following the law here, we are all perfectly civilized, and now we will kill you all... Except some we will just put in prison for 20 years... We’ll let you know which is which, soon, just after we go through these circus acts we are calling trials.’

The long-term, second result of calling the Nazis and Japanese militarists ‘monsters’ is that ‘we’ are therefore ‘different’ from ‘them.’ This leaves us in an even worse position: We are unable to imagine that we could ever do anything like that. We are then blind to even the possibility.

So when we get a would-be dictator, and a regime comes into power run by men who have published a manifesto aiming at world domination by us for a century and more, we can’t even see how close this is to our cartoon version of Hitler’s ‘Today Poland, tomorrow, the world!’

We can’t imagine that our troops could commit war crimes like the Japanese and Nazis did.

We can’t imagine that our leaders could commit war crimes like the German and Japanese leaders did.

(And of course we should know all about those war crimes now, since we invented them 60 years ago, and they have been our law ever since! This is totally different from a war victor telling the defeated, ‘Oh by the way, what you did in the war was against these laws that I just made up, so I’m afraid I am going to have to punish you for that.’)

‘We’ are not Nazis. ‘We’ are ‘different.’ ‘We’ would never do any such thing.

This leaves us completely defenseless to guard against it happening to us. So we get our would-be dictator, and we support him just as the Germans supported Hitler.

If only we had acknowledged that the Nazis were human, and that there was nothing so unusual about what they did, and that under the right circumstances we too could follow the very same path... Then we might have wondered, ‘How does anybody end up going down that path, and what keeps one person from going down it when so many others follow it?’

And then we might have been able to teach our children in school, not ‘Germans and Japanese were monsters’ but rather, ‘Beware of thinking you are different, and beware of every leader who would take you into war, and always look on your enemy as a brother-man.’

So when you meet the devil, be on guard against him! — but once you have assured your own safety, look him in the eye, and recognize that he is, after all, your brother. And that in someone else’s eye, you might yourself look a bit satanic…

(Composed on keyboard Wednesday, June 25, 2008)

How Dull Can You Get?

The great tale is not measured by its performance

Three Steps of Composition

Telling a tale ‘from scratch’ as it were, involves three steps:

1. Dream up the story
2. Structure the story
3. Perform the story

When the talesman thinks of a setting, characters, relationships, and an action, he dreams up the story. Very often the talesman does not create all these elements out of thin air and his own imagination. Sometimes he hears about the action, other times he notes an interesting character, and he might find a setting that inspires him to dream about what might happen there.

This basic dream of the tale is chronological, straightforward, simple, and without surprise. The talesman tells it to himself, changing elements to suit his taste, to suit developments in the tale, and to suit other elements. There are no surprises because the talesman knows everything there is to know about the tale. There will be mysteries, though, unknowns that the talesman has not yet decided or considered.

Once the tale is fully fleshed out as a tale, the talesman proceeds to give it a structure. This means he may re-order events, conceal information to be revealed later, skip events, give a character a false appearance until the talesman thinks the time is right to reveal the truth about the character. He may design the tale to give the audience a surprise or two along the way. He may begin the tale after the beginning, and end before the end. He may tell it backwards, forwards, or looping back and forth upon itself.

The structure may be as simple as the dream from whence it springs; the talesman may choose to tell the tale in a straightforward manner. Or the structure may be convoluted, and even the talesman, aided with outlines and notes, may lose his way through the thickets of his own devising.

Finally, the talesman writes the tale, or tells it in some form, to an audience. Here he must perform the tale for the sake of his audience’s pleasure.

I call this a ‘performance’ because the act of writing the lines we read is very much a performance. The talesman adopts a mask or character in writing, a style, a vocabulary, an attitude. The finished tale, as we in the audience receive it, has a personality that the simple tale and its structural plans lack. It is to this step that most people refer when they talk about ‘the art of writing.’ I agree; the art involved with dreaming the story and structuring it is that of talesmanship rather than of writing. These are different arts, and talesmen of the past have shown themselves to be masters of one, who are indifferent journeymen of the other.

A strong style, or bold, powerful performance, can hide many weaknesses in talesmanship.

Even the talesman himself can be fooled by his own performance.

The Last Act Before the Curtain Rises

Because the talesman can impress even himself with his literary tricks and talent, he can delude himself into considering his tale strong when it is weak. He sees the strong performance he gives, and confounds that with the tale as he has structured it.

Therefore I deem it wise for the talesman to write out a sort of proto-draft or treatment of the story, when he has completed his structure to his initial satisfaction.

In this treatment he should eschew all elements of a strong performance; style and wit and effects he should avoid at all cost.

In short he should make this treatment as dull as he can. It should be as though a 9-year old told it; as though a dispassionate robot intoned it. It should be little better than a list of events.

When the structured tale is told in this manner, with the least-powerful performance, the basic strength of the tale itself will be laid bare. Any excitement, any suspense or tension, any surprise, any mystery, joy, delight, or involvement the talesman feels as he reads over this treatment, must come, can only come, from the tale itself.

This is the true test of his mastery over the art of talesmanship.

The talesman at this point may find he has a very dull tale.

There is the old joke of the screenwriter,

who woke in the middle of the night with a great notion for a screenplay. It was the best idea he had ever had — the best he had ever heard of. Quickly he took a pen and sheet of paper, and scribbled the essence of the idea, enough so that he would be sure not to forget when he rose in the morning; then he went back to sleep. When he did wake, he looked at the note he had written, and found three words:

Boy meets girl

He never managed to recall what had inspired him to consider the idea so wonderful during the night.

A simple tale can be strongly told. A weak, dull tale can work magic over us, if the talesman be a literary magician of sufficient prowess. There is no shame in this. There is only shame in the talesman who boasts how original and exciting his tale is, when it is as old as the Moon and dull as soap.

The purpose of this dull treatment is for the talesman’s own information, so that he knows whether the tale has great power in itself, or whether he will have to provide all the magic with his performance.

How to Do It

The best way to learn how to write such a treatment, and sharpen you skill at it, is to boil down another talesman’s work into its treatment phase. When you deal with the work of another man, you will feel less temptation to sneak in a little of the old razzle-dazzle and goose up the lines. This exercise will also teach you something of the performing-wizardry of the talesman whose tale you treat in this way.

(Composed on keyboard Tuesday, June 24, 2008)

More on Allegories

The line between allegory and Allegorica Mysteria

I mentioned yesterday, in ‘Allegorica Mysteria’ that I don’t like allegories, and hardly can bring myself to call them tales. But I do have a feeling that David Lindsay’s A Voyage to Arcturus is an allegory — and yet I like it. So I had to think up a new term, the allegorica mysteria, to call these allegories that are personal in nature, and refer to real events without being romans à clef, and really mean to conceal what they are actually about. Reading such tales, we get the feeling that they are allegories, but without an intimate knowledge of the talesman’s life, we can’t be wholly sure, and can only grope blindly to reach the truth or actual experiences that inspired the tale.

This leaves us in a bit of a fog or swamp of ambiguity, not knowing what it’s all about. On the other hand, these allegoricae mysteriae contain some real suspense, unlike standard allegories. They spring from real events, which have no set or pre-planned outcome.

Now I add a few points.

Suspense in an Allegory

It is possible, I think, to have real suspense in an allegory of the usual kind. Take Pilgrim’s Progress as an example. This is the allegory of the common man who finds redemption through greater closeness to living in harmony with the New Testament; it is a document of the Pilgrims, or the new Protestant revolution in England. So for any of us who knows the dogma of Protestant Christianity, we know the playbook … except …

—What if Pilgrim is not redeemed at the end?

Bunyan was writing about his own salvation, sharing his ‘good story’ as it were with any other men who cared to be saved. But he could just as well have told the tale of a Pilgrim who was not saved, who had the choice of Good or Evil, Dogma or Violation — and chose Evil and Violation, and went down into a seething pit of Fire for Eternity as his punishment. Bunyan could, moreover, have composed this tale without being sure in his own mind whether his Pilgrim would end up being saved or damned. Then indeed we readers would have been biting our nails wondering whether our hero would embrace the light (so clear to us) or fall on the path.

This sort of doubt applies to A Voyage to Arcturus as the hero, Maskull, goes from group to group, each of which lives very different lives, sees the world in different ways, and has their own moral and philosophical code to support their way of life. As he falls in with each group, Maskull adopts their philosophy, sometimes under duress, sometimes choosing, sometimes thinking that he chooses when he is in fact deceived. Each time he repudiates the morality of the previous groups in embracing that of the new. We in the audience are left unsure which is the best path (though I have my favorites, of course, and I’m sure I share them with most readers in Lindsay’s intended audience of middle-class English readers of the mid-20th century), and we are unsure what morality the hero will finally embrace.

Moreover, we are given clues, and predictions are made along the way, that Maskull might do something very bad before he is done. He might do the right thing — he himself hopes he will — he might do the wrong thing, as some accuse him. Or he might do the wrong thing while believing himself that it is the right thing, as one or more foresee.

The effect of this is to produce in me considerable suspense.

Not only do I not know where the tale is going, thanks to its reflection of personal events in Mr Lindsay’s life (as I conceive it) — for if the tale follows some events in real life, no one can tell what comes next but Lindsay himself — but I also don’t know what the talesman will end up defining as ‘right’ or the True Dogma. And furthermore, I don’t know if our hero will end up acting in accordance with this True Dogma, or breaking it, and sinning a mighty sin.

Indeed, since this appears to be an Allegorica Mysteria, I have the strong suspicion that Maskull will do the Wrong Thing in the end, and ruin what he hopes to save. For the talesman who tells his own tale with such artifice and concealment, usually seeks to hide his own secret shame, his own ruin, his own sin, and tells us all about it in an effort to purge himself of grief and guilt.

And suspense seems to be higher when we Fear for the Worst rather than when we Hope for the Best.

(Composed on keyboard Monday, June 23, 2008)

Allegorica Mysteria

Allegories I like, allegories I don’t

The Hollow Tale

I’ve always disliked allegories.

For one thing, the concretes of the tale in an allegory thin out, hollow out, and are rendered vapid, because they don’t exist for their own sake. Nothing is real, it merely represents some ideas the talesman has. The characters don’t act out of their own motives, have no personality; they are mere puppets to get the talesman’s point across.

Indeed, I hesitate even to call allegories ‘tales’ — they are rather lectures, sermons, philosophies dressed up to appear like tales, to trick us, like the sugar coating on a bitter medicine pill.

More, when we in the audience know the message the talesman-allegorist has in mind, the tale itself loses all suspense, for we know where everything is going — where it must go to fulfill the message.

The Path of Allegory

There are three stages we in the audience may go through when we hear an allegory:

1. Is it a tale? It is an odd one. Here we, innocent as lambs, hear the tale and are taken in by the allegorist’s trickery. We believe his assertion that he is telling us a tale. We like tales, so we listen. But somewhere in our hearing, we begin to feel that the tale is an odd one, the characters don’t feel like ‘real flesh and blood,’ and are acting rather strangely. Usually in an allegory there are the preacher characters, and the allegorist trots these onto his stage in order to make clear the points of his message. Needless to say, the more such preachers the allegorist resorts to, and the longer-winded their sermons, the worse a talesman he is. The best allegorist will have no preachers, and no sermons in his tale. But then, you see, he must trust his audience to understand the message underlying the tale, and not treat it as a mere tale, but as a message. And most allegorists don’t dare that risk. They must make sure we ‘get it.’ And so even when there are no preacher characters and no sermons, the allegorist will bend and shape his allegory so that at some point along the way (best if it comes at the very last line, or just after the telling is done) we in the audience ‘see through’ the surface of the tale, and understand this has all been but the dress of a deeper message.
2. It is not a tale! He tricked me, it’s only an allegory! Once we do understand that the tale is an allegory, we listen on with a different frame of mind. We may pass through a moment of irritation — ‘It isn’t a real story after all!’ — but then, if we do not cease to listen completely, we will listen and try to grasp the underlying message. At this point the experience is no longer a talesman, his tale, and his audience. It is rather a riddler, and a group of puzzle-solvers, trying to understand the meaning beneath the clues. This is a very different experience from following a tale. We discard the characters, feel nothing for them; they are but the embodiments of traits in the philosophical or moral scheme. Events no longer raise in us any pity, terror, joy, or desire. What happens is no more than the working-out of an argument.
3. I know what this is about! If it should happen that we know already the philosophy, cult, or moral outlook the allegorist espouses, then we can see it through the scheme of his allegory. At this point we know perfectly well what he is saying, and the rest of the tale is as predictable as a ball rolling down a channel in a hill, as well-known as a sequence: A, B, C, D, E… or 1, 2, 3, 4, 5… In truth, this can be quite boring, except in the case where the message that lies under the allegory is one the listener believes in strongly, feels is embattled and beset about by unbelievers, and so he enjoys having his ‘truth’ reaffirmed by the allegorist and his allegory. ‘Right on, brother! Sing it! Tell them all the way it really is!’ would be our feeling. For those of us in this category, the tale that covers the allegory resumes some tissue of substance: that really is the way people act, or should act; the preachers are wise men, we wish we met such men in our lives; the events told of are what would, of course, happen in the real world — or at least in the real world if things went as they should.

An Allegory of Another Kind

Against all this, there is the personal allegory or allegory fraught for the audience with mystery — and so I call it the Allegorica Mysteria.

David Lindsay’s A Voyage to Arcturus struck me as a tale of this kind.

The difference between the allegory that cleaves to a doctrine, perhaps unknown, perhaps well known, and the allegory wholly personal in nature, is that the personal allegory refers back to actual events. These events the talesman feels he must conceal, for whatever reason, usually embarrassment or the desire to shelter the feelings of those real persons to whom the tale refers. There is, after all, a tale underneath.

More, the allegorica mysteria, dealing as it does with the talesman’s real life history, or some events of which he knows, does not follow the logical or sequential or schematic progress of the allegory of dogma. This means that the end cannot be ‘solved’ by the audience once they ‘get’ the underlying message.

There is in fact no ‘message’ underlying the allegorica mysteria, only the experiences.

Where the allegorica mysteria tells (obliquely) of the talesman’s own life story, it bears with it a weight of true feeling, and the feeling the talesman brings to the allegorica mysteria is a deep one. If the events of which he tells were light and inconsequential, he would probably not clothe them in allegorical dress. (This does happen, and has: say in the example of a man recounting an amorous conquest of a well-known lady of unimpeachable reputation, or telling about the humorous blunders of departments of the State. In such cases delicacy or the fear of lawsuit or imprisonment might drive the talesman to use allegorical dress. And yet such allegories might fall under a third branch, for here the allegorist does desire for his audience to solve the riddle, and understand just who the lady is, and what ministers are the fools of the tale. He just feels he cannot name names outright.)

The allegorist of the allegorica mysteria is at some pains to relate his experience, out of the need, perhaps, to purge his feelings of loss, disappointment, whatever (they are rarely happy feelings), or perhaps he feels he ought to warn his audience against the fate that ensnared him. Therefore the riddle is hard for us to grasp, and remains to a large extent maddeningly out of reach.

Because it is an allegory, the allegorica mysteria treats its events and characters in ways different from the open, outright tale. When the talesman outfits his own experiences in the garb of the allegory, something is lost in the way of clear understanding of relationships; at the same time something is gained in the way of mystery. He will often place his allegorica mysteria in some foreign land or time, as Lindsay set his romance on the planet of Tormance in the double-sun of Arcturus. He does so maybe out of the desire to set his tale as far as possible from the true setting of the events that inspired it. Or maybe he does so in the hope that we will penetrate the veil of mystery a little bit, only so far as to see that this is not just a bizarre bit of amusement, but that the talesman has a point, a dire warning or deep experience he wishes to share with us.

In the Fog and Liking It

I find I rather like the allegorica mysteria, although I detest the outright allegory. I feel when I am hearing these mysteries that I want to reach through and grasp the underlying event or experience of the talesman, and yet at the same time I am content to drift in the ambiguity of a riddle that I cannot solve, that may be insoluble.

(Composed on keyboard Sunday, June 22, 2008)

His Talesman’s Voice

How to keep the Narrator’s Voice in the Reader’s Ear

Yesterday, in ‘Bad Head Hops,’ I wrote about David Lindsay’s A Voyage to Arcturus as an example of ‘head hopping’ — the practice of telling us readers what different characters in a single scene are thinking and feeling, without the voice of the narrator to intermediate — and I agreed that under these conditions, I found the effect jarring and unpleasant. The only way to ‘head hop’ and not jar the audience is to give us something to rely on as we peer from head to head. If we hear the voice of the narrator, then we can accept that he tells us what one character thinks, and then another character, in the same scene. And of course, this is the way all tales were told in the beginning, and for a hundred thousand years afterward.

This does come at a price — so long as we hear the narrator’s voice, we are aware of him, standing as intermediary between us and the characters. We experience the tale as a tale, and not as a dream in which we participate directly as one of the characters. The vividness pales, and we lose the sense of being swallowed up in the world, the characters, the events. We cannot lose ourselves in the tale. But it is this very loss of self that seems to appeal so strongly to readers today, which is why this first- or third-person subjective voice dominates in fiction, and has done so for decades.

But let’s say a talesman wished to tell his tale ‘the old-fashioned way’ — how to go about it?

I think his task is made harder by the current trends. Readers today are so accustomed to the subjective voice, and the transparent narrator, that we find it hard to remember that the tale does have a narrator at all, even though his name is on the cover, and his picture may be there too — even though he may be famous and we see him being interviewed and read news stories about him!

It’s even hard to tell a tale in this way. At least it is for me: time and again I find myself losing myself in my own tales, forgetting I am telling them, and slipping back into the subjectivity of dreams. The writing becomes semi-automatic, it flows with the current of the events as I imagine them taking place before me and all around me. Time and again I must remind myself that I am telling this, and drag myself back to narrating.

These bits of advice, then, you must take as only partial answers to the riddle. If you want to tell tales the traditional way, as the talesman, then try these techniques, but it may yet happen to you as it does to me, and you will find you need to watch yourself as you write, bring yourself back out of the swamp of subjectivity and dream, and train yourself to this more traditional (and more natural?) way.

First, the opening. Here the Narrator must be established strongly. The start of any tale is formless and void; the audience has the least expectations here, of what the tale will be, how it will proceed, and what his role will be. The very first sentence must establish the Narrator as ‘I’ or ‘We’ or even by name. Or else it must establish the Narrator by implication by naming the audience as ‘You.’ Both effects are possible by using ‘We’ to include both Narrator and Audience:

We have heard many tales, you and I, of King Arthur and his knights of the Table Round. But this tale is a bit unusual, even for that fairy realm.

In the example above, another way to establish the Narrator by implication, is shown: that is to openly admit that what is begun is a Tale; this strongly implies the Talesman.

But even with the Narrator established at the start, talesman and audience, accustomed to the modern fashion of the un-narrated narrative, may well forget. Thus it helps to offer reminders along the way. These reminders bring the voice of the Narrator back into focus for a paragraph or more, and force the audience to remember their relationship to the events, that this is a tale they are being told.

Where to put such reminders, so that they don’t interrupt the flow of events more than need be?

Any place where there is a natural break in the tale is a good place for the Narrator to speak once more in his own voice. This happens, for example, where a series of events must be summed up between scenes, where a passage of time takes place, or a passage from one setting to a distant one. It also happens when the narrative leaves following one character and takes up events dominated by another character.

Structural breaks are also good places to use for these reminders. Section breaks, chapter breaks, part breaks — all offer the narrative a further, if diminished, chance to ‘start over again,’ and so the same strategy the Talesman used at the tale’s start can be used again here.

It is also good if the talesman who would try this traditional way of telling his tale, should immerse himself in the reading of tales told using this approach. Read them, and speak them aloud, and try to imagine that you have an audience about you. Record your readings, and play them back, and hear them as the audience.

Finally, the best way to do this is for the talesman to bear in mind, all the while, that he is telling the tale. When he sits down to start his composition again, and when he leaves off; when he re-reads what he has written, and re-drafts.

These ploys should in the end no longer be needed and the practice should become ‘second nature’ to the talesman, like a second language, so that he should find he can take up a tale as un-narrated, or as narrated, just as he pleases.

(Composed on keyboard Saturday, June 21, 2008)

Bad Head Hops

‘Head hopping’ sounds awkward when the Narrator is unheard

David Lindsay is famous for his fantasy novel, A Voyage to Arcturus which I began to read last night. The narrative tells us what different characters in a single scene are feeling, or thinking. This is known nowadays as ‘head hopping’ and it is frowned upon.

‘Head hopping’ of course is standard tale-telling of old, back in the days when tales were told and the talesman acknowledged the fact that he was telling them. But then there came the more subjective tale, culminating in the stream-of-consciousness tale, in which the text pretends to represent the thoughts and feelings of a character while he is experiencing the events of the tale. And then there came the more objective narrative, in which the talesman confined his words to describing only what an observer to each scene could sense; in the objective narrative we can see, and hear, and even smell and taste and feel, but who is sensing all these experiences is unsaid — no more than an instrument recording certain things, like a tape recorder or surveillance camera.

The objective narrative pretends that the talesman does not exist.

The subjective narrative as it is practiced today, also pretends that the talesman is not telling the tale that he is telling us, but presents its events as experienced by one or more of the characters of the tale. The strong preference of critics, writers, and editors, is that there be no more than one subjective character (or point of view character) in any one scene. Purists of this esthetic prefer that there be only one point of view character in an entire tale, whether it be told in first person or third person subjective.

This approach helps us in the audience to feel that the tale is a dream we are having, one whose events we experience ourselves; this makes the events more engaging, and gives the tale a certain advantage over movies, which cannot create this intense subjectivity.

Thus it is a bit of a jolt to suddenly ‘jump’ from one character’s experience of a scene into another character’s experience of that same scene. Our sense of identification is jarred and broken.

I felt this jolt in Lindsay’s tale, and it occurred to me that those who decry ‘head hopping’ are correct to do so.

On the other hand, what makes the jolt more apparent is the fact that Lindsay has no narrator. He begins his tale in objective fashion, and then (here and there) interposes what this character feels and thinks of the scene, and then what that other character feels and thinks of it.

Had Lindsay acknowledged himself as narrator, and given us readers a strong sense of that narrator, these head hops would not have been jarring at all. They would have been no more jarring than any tale you’ll hear over dinner or at a bar, told by a jolly raconteur:

So John went to his supervisor and demanded a raise. Well, the supervisor didn’t like that, and he didn’t want to give John the raise, but all the same, he didn’t want to lose him. John on the other hand was desperate — he knew he couldn’t afford to lose the job, and yet he wanted that extra money — all his plans depended on it.

Here we can see that the talesman has no ‘I’ presence in the tale, and no opinion of the events, and yet his ‘voice’ is very strong, strong enough to ground us when he bounces us between John and his supervisor’s heads.

(Composed on keyboard Friday, June 20, 2008)

First Rhyme

The birth of poetry

Here is my theory on the beginning of poetry. The birth of a thing tells us what it is. Thus we can say what is not in poetry’s beginnings, is not poetry.

The first seeds of poetry came in word play. Children will play with words, with two words that sound alike but mean different things, with puns, but mostly with the sound of words. Alliteration, assonance, and rhyme, along with words that sound like what they represent.

Rhythm was not at first part of poetry but came with it early. Rhythm would have begun with the pace and beat of walking, then with hitting things with fist or stick or other tool.

I have three candidates for the first kind of poem.

1. The magical incantation
2. Memory aid
3. Toil relief

There is a sort of magic in song (which is what we would call the first poems). Songs invoke and call the gods and magical forces to us. This is I think due to the effect a strongly-rhythmic, rhyming song has upon us. The trance that we fall under, while singing or hearing a long, rhythmic chant, seems filled with magic itself. It is only natural to feel the close presence of powerful forces.

Poems help us to remember them (and their contents) using a combination of effects. Rhythm and rhyme afford a poem what is called a ‘check-sum’ in computer algorithms. Together they allow for the reconstruction of lines only partly remembered. If you know one end-word of a rhyme couplet, you narrow the choices for its mate. The sense of the phrase gives you another guidepost. In simple language, you may end with only one possible word that could fit the meter and the rhyme.

Songs help us to get through the effort of a long hike, repeated work (such as chopping wood) and even pain, by distracting us as well as luring us into the seductive trance. The song moves through us, and the work accomplishes itself. The beat of the song regulates the actions of the work. Set the beat of the song right, and we can go on working at a given level, our best, for much longer than we could without the song. Without the song, we would be tempted to work fast and hard and exhaust ourselves early on, then rest too long or even give it up.

Therefore I define poetry in formal terms. It is oral and to be sung, chanted, or heard. A poem that fails these three purposes, that does not induce the spell, or help us to remember it, or lift us through toil, is a poor poem — or is no poem at all.

The needs of meter and rhyme, alliteration, assonance, and so forth, compelled poets to substitute language, and to speak in tropes or allusion. This gave rise to the notion that ‘poetry’ was not ‘prosaic’ language, and that mere images and rhetorical devices were somehow the essence of poetry. Thus prose can be called ‘poetic.’ When poetry was primarily read by the eye instead of spoken, remembered, or heard, line breaks came to be seen as the heart of poetry — later the visual arrangement of words (and even letters and numbers) on the page came to be seen as an inherent part. Meanwhile the original poetry, the true poetry, was called ‘doggerel’ and deemed inferior and cheap.

If we wish to call these written and read new forms ‘poems’ then we need another term for what poetry really is.

(Composed on keyboard Thursday, June 19, 2008)

The Screenplay: The Silent Treatment

A silent film … a screenplay without sound…

It was held of old (say, in the 1930s) that directors would watch cuts of their movies with the sound turned off. They wanted to see whether the movie made sense and its story could be followed strictly by watching the visuals. Doing this trained them to pay more care about what the camera was showing us in the audience while the actors were talking. (Dialogue is the area of the soundscape that carries most story most densely.)

The same trick could be played by screenwriters, especially those learning the craft.

Try to imagine your screenplay as if it were a movie, but turn the sound off in your imagination. Now you are watching the movie, but you can’t hear what anyone is saying, and you can’t hear any sound effects. Then alter what you see, and what the actors are doing physically, visually, until the sense of the tale is readily apparent. (By the way, this gives you a further trick, that of going the other way: make the visuals ‘lie’ as to what is going on. So that the audience, both seeing and hearing, is taking in sounds that tell one tale, and pictures that tell another.)

‘But isn’t this just writing a treatment?’

No.

A treatment is a prose version of the story the screenplay will tell. It has no dialogue (or only a few lines in its whole extent) but it does indicate the topic of conversation, in indirect discourse:

Then John sees Ernest. Ernest asks where John has been and what he’s been up to. At first John is evasive; this makes Ernest only more suspicious, and he angrily confronts John and calls him out. Only then does John admit he was with Magda in her apartment, and that the two of them have been hooking up for the past two weeks.

A treatment is also shorter than the screenplay that will come of it, though treatments can vary in length from 10 pages to 75.

By contrast, this ‘silent version’ would end up being just as long as the script, and possibly longer. It can also be formatted with standard screenplay formatting rather than the paragraphed, prose format of a treatment.

John looks behind him.

Ernest is coming in through the door. His look is serious.

John looks for some way to leave.

Ernest grabs John’s arm and says something.

John smiles, though the smile looks fake. He says something and tries to leave, but Ernest doesn’t let him go. Ernest frowns and says something else. John laughs and Ernest grabs him by both shoulders and shakes him…

In this (poor) example, we can see one of the weaknesses of the approach. Trying to make the characters’ attitudes plain, I have forced the actors to indulge in ‘indicating’ or expressing their positions in overt, obvious gestures. I asked the actors to be hams, in a word. And of course when the movie is made, much of this will be changed by the director and actors, though perhaps they will keep the essential actions, and have John still trying to make it out the door, and Ernest blocking his way.

But even this weakness forces me to try again, looking for some other way to symbolize approach and evasion.

In this regard, a scene from Rouben Mamoulian’s The Mark of Zorro occurs to me: the Spanish governor is plotting his moves to exact wealth and squeeze the territory; this he symbolizes by spinning a large globe. But Capitan Pasquale (played by Basil Rathbone) is intent on finding out what to do with this rascal Zorro. He stops the globe spinning, and barks his question. The governor fumbles an answer, and sets the globe spinning, retreating into his fantasies. Once more the capitan stops the globe and asks what the governor means to do about Zorro.

The business with the globe may well have been invented by Mamoulian and/or the actors, but it could also have been dreamed up by the screenwriter John Taintor Foote.

(Composed on keyboard Wednesday, June 18, 2008)

The Screenplay: The End After the End

A good movie carries on after the final curtain, but what about its screenplay?

Social and Dramatic

A movie like the theater is both social and dramatic. That is: the movie shows us in the audience external or dramatic events only, and we watch it en masse. This creates a sharing of our emotional reactions to the play, or movie. Once an audience starts laughing, things seem funnier than they ‘really are.’ When an audience begins to fret, it squirms and fears a lot more than any one member would if he watched the movie by himself. And when the movie ends and we stand up and walk out of the movie house, and for some time afterward, we talk about the experience we just shared, and reach toward a shared understanding of what the movie meant to us.

This offers the filmmakers the chance to work past the narrow time limits of the film proper. It means that the true end of the movie comes not with the end of the end credits, but sometime after that, when the audience settles finally in our judgment of the movie, when we feel the last feeling toward it, and when the changes these feelings work in us have finished.

A good screenwriter knows this very well, and he structures his screenplay to take advantage of it. The ‘end after the end’ helps the screenwriter no less than the director and editor to overcome the limits of the movie, or in this case the number of pages the screenwriter is allowed.

Not Social Or Dramatic

The problem is that the script will not be read en masse nor will it be dramatic. A screenplay is told in words alone, in a special format designed to evoke something of what the finished movie would be like; it is a plan to the movie, but it can never be the movie. People in the business of making movies gain experience over the years in reading scripts and seeing the movies that are made from those scripts, and have a far more acute sense of the potential movie that the screenplay points to. But even they can’t fully anticipate the effect of the finished movie, and they read alone and silently, without the communication of emotions from others. And when these professionals put the script aside, their first thoughts are practical: who could make this movie, what would its budget be, would it sell, who could star in it, and would it be worth three years of their lives working on it?

The professional screenwriter thus must be aware that he is writing his script for two audiences, first for the professionals who decide whether or not they wish to make it into a movie, and second for the audience who would eventually see the movie, and never one page of the screenplay.

The screenplay must ‘work’ and be effective without the ‘end after the end,’ and yet it will ideally gain greater power when made into a movie and watched by an audience who will then go on to experience the ‘end after the end.’

He must keep both in mind.

To get a sense of how the ‘end after the end’ works, pay close attention to your own reactions to a movie when you watch it in a crowded movie house, and in the hours and days afterwards. Compare the experience to the one you feel when you watch a movie alone on video. Also compare to how the screenplay affects you.

In Other Forms

The ‘end after the end’ is not unique to the dramatic arts, and we can feel something of the sort when we read a great novel, alone, in words alone. But the dual effects of watching in a crowd and sharing the experience and discussing it afterward, make the ‘end after the end’ somewhat different and more powerful than the tale in words can manage.

For those who write their screenplays as proto-drafts with an eye to developing them as novels or other forms, these considerations do not apply.

(Composed on keyboard Tuesday, June 17, 2008)

The Screenplay: the Dance of Word and Deed

When characters talk, shouldn’t they be doing something too?

Hitchcock the Silent Moviemaker

Alfred Hitchcock was one of the great commercial directors of his era. He started in movies before sound reproduction became viable; his first sound movie (Blackmail in 1929) was planned as a silent film, and much of it was already shot when the producers in London decided to complete it as a talkie. Dialogue scenes were written and shot and intercut with already-shot silent scenes, a common practice for those movies caught in the transition.

Oddly enough, Hitchcock would continue to follow this pattern throughout his career. He would make films more than 30 years later that alternated dialogue scenes with scenes that were essentially silent, either without any dialogue at all, or with such minimal dialogue that it wasn’t needed or could have been handled in the old way of the silents, with a couple of title cards.

And his most famous, suspenseful, and interesting scenes and sequences, were the silent ones. Those are the ones we remember best.

In other scenes, Hitchcock used a hybrid approach, and flood a suspenseful scene that would work as well as silent with lines of endless talk, so much talk that we the audience would tune out and concentrate on the visual compositions, which always showed the suspense — which was what the scene was really about. (An example would be the scene in The Lady Vanishes where the evil Nazis have drugged the drinks in the club car, and we worry lest Margaret Lockwood and Michael Redgrave’s characters will drink, and be defeated. The shots show the drinks, the hands reaching for the drinks, the Nazis watching to see if the English will drink the drinks. Meanwhile they all chatter on and on.) Sometimes, knowing that the audience would tune out the dialogue in these scenes, Hitchcock would slip into the speeches some vital clue or bit of information, confident that we would miss it … and yet, it was there: he had ‘played fair’ with us.

Talk and Action

A similar effect takes over the beginning screenwriter and, sometimes, the veteran as well. He will compose some scenes for their actions, and neglect dialogue, or reduce it to its minimum. Or he will compose other scenes for their dialogue, and forget that his characters might also be doing something while they talk.

One recurring example is the dining scene. It can be in a home dining room or kitchen, it can be in a bar or restaurant: the characters will sit at the table and talk. Important matters will be discussed; exposition and backstory will fill the air, personal conflicts will heighten. But the characters won’t eat a thing. Instead the screenwriter and the director will set the scene in the moments before the food arrives, before anyone eats anything, or after the last mouthful is swallowed.

Directors rather prefer this approach, since it saves them a lot of trouble with continuity: was the hero about to sip his drink when he said that line, or was he cutting his meat? How much of her soup should the heroine have in her bowl at this point? Was the wineglass full or almost empty, and was it here or there on the table? Such points bedevil the best script girl or continuity consultant, and the more characters there are about the table, the more the complexities conjugate. Not to mention that props must provide a fresh set of every item of food with each new take.

Actors (at least beginning actors) also prefer this approach, since it is difficult to remember to match actions with lines of dialogue in take after take and angle after angle so that everything will match. And they have to act as well? Chewing food makes it hard to enunciate, and when the mounting number of takes adds to the number of plates of brussel sprouts the actor must eat…

Moreover, the lowly screenwriter in such scenes ends up with little control over how they will be played: he can clutter his screenplay with line directions over what should be done, but the director and actors will gleefully (or scornfully) discard all such when they begin rehearsals.

All the same, it is a grave error for the screenwriter to fall completely into the dialogue of these talking scenes, whether at the dinner table or in the bedroom or the boardroom, and forget about the actions of his characters. This is to give up control of such things to the director and actors who, when production is rushed, might forget them as well. What we end up watching is a scene where two or more people sit or stand and talk at one another … while doing nothing else. (For a painful example of this, look at all of Robert DeNiro’s scenes in Alan Parker’s Angel Heart. The only excuse I can offer for Mr Parker, a good director, is that DeNiro and Mickey Rourke were offering such wildly different line readings with every take, that letting them move in addition would have made it impossible to intercut between takes. But that is an excuse, not a justification.)

What Deeds Can Add

The problem of the action scene without enough dialogue is less than this, the talking scene with no activity. So let’s look at what actions can add to the lines of dialogue.

An action can put the lie to what the character is saying. ‘No, I care very much what you’re saying,’ says one character, while idly leafing through a mail order catalogue.

An action can reinforce what the character is saying. ‘No, I care very much what you’re saying,’ says one character, leaning forward across the table, all ears.

An action can reveal the character’s true feelings, that his words and even his control over his voice, may try to mask.

An action can symbolize some deeper feeling or meaning the character brings to the scene.

An action can symbolize something deeper to the other characters in the scene, especially if the point of view of the scene is strongly anchored on one of these characters.

(Composed on keyboard Monday, June 16, 2008)

The Screenplay: the Montage

Those boring passages where nothing happens

The term montage refers first of all to cutting, and second to the theory, proposed by those critics who believed that there was no art to taking a photograph, as photography was a strictly mechanical process (apparently those critics had never taken a photograph in their lives, or if they had, had never looked at it), the only ‘art’ in the cinema lay in the juxtaposition of two images to evoke a third, or other idea. There was set design and acting, of course, but those were ‘properly’ theatrical arts, and so editing, or montage, was the one true cinematic art.

Later on, in Hollywood, the term montage was applied to those sequences of quick shots that summarize a passage of time. This is the sense of the term I mean here, because it’s the one that screenwriters ought to know about.

The Love Romp

Usually today, montage is used for romance, and covers the first blush of love. Fully developed scenes are written to cover the conflict of desire and elusiveness, the flirtation, the courtship of the lovers. This culminates in the first kiss, the first romantic kiss, or the first full intimate encounter.

At this point, the troubles of pursuit and capture, of the wooing, are ended: the two lovers have agreed they love each other. That suspense, of ‘will they get together?’ is also ended. This point might be the end of some plots, but in Hollywood tradition, a simple ‘boy gets girl’ is not enough; instead the formula is used of ‘boy gets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl back’ or some variant of it.

And yet, we in the audience do want a chance to savor the capturing of love, its bloom and freshness, before the cloud of trouble and loss darkens the sky. The problem is, nothing dramatic happens during this period of the honeymoon. The lovers begin happy, they are happy, they go on being happy.

We can endure sustained misery, for it contains its own suspense. No character likes being miserable, and so while he is unhappy he is fighting against it and searching for a way out of it. But this is not true of happiness. Characters do like being happy, and want to go on being happy. They don’t want it to change.

As a result, the honeymoon period is usually handled briefly. There is a feeling that the audience wants it. Structurally, it works better if the lovers have this time together in order to deepen their involvement before the forces arise that threaten to break them apart. But there is no suspense in this period, and so, dramatically speaking, it is boring.

So it’s covered in a montage of shots of the lovers together.

A similar logic covers the ‘rise’ period of a success story. Take a tale that deals with the hero’s career. His start is dealt with in detailed scenes; there is suspense in whether he will get his foot in the door, get his first break, and whether he will gain any success from that chance. He may well fail, and have to start over again, before he wins that first success. But from the point of first success, there is a period like the lover’s honeymoon, in which the hero gets more success and more success, and rises toward the top of his profession. Again, there is no drama here; the hero does well, he goes on doing well, he does better and better. We in the audience would like to share in this rising spiral of success, as if it were our own. Structurally, it works better for plausibility if the hero climbs the ladder of success one rung at a time, and we see a few of those rungs surmounted along the way. This not only makes it easier for us to believe he has reached the top, but it gives us a bit of time to invest ourselves in his rise and his success — all the better to make us fear for its loss. What is won at some effort is treasured all the more.

The next dramatic moment, both for the lovers and for the career success, comes when, at the height of their achievement, the cloud comes that will threaten their love or his success.

In between the first kiss and the threat of the other woman (or illness, or poverty, or what-have-you) and in between the first glimmer of success and the moment when, on top of his profession, the hero faces the risk of losing it all, comes the montage.

Quick, and Interesting

What is important for the screenwriter to bear in mind is that during the period the montage covers, nothing happens dramatically — and we know it.

The audience at this point splits in two. There is the party that wants to revel in the love, the success, the violence, or whatever the main sensual appeal is of the sequence. But there is also the rest of the audience, who waits impatiently for ‘the story to start up again.’ For the story pauses while the montage plays.

In the theater, an act break would do instead of montage. The curtain falls, it rises again: the lovers have been together a year, the hero is the darling of his professional world, the gangster is head of the underworld and the most feared man in the city.

For the sake of those of us who just want to get on with it, then, the montage should be designed to be as brief as possible.

The montage should also be designed to appeal to the senses. This is, properly speaking, the realm of other departments of the crew: the production designer, the camera, the musical composer, the actors. The screenwriter can help them if he proposes scenelets that will inspire them to their best.

How many scenelets are enough, how many are too many? For this, you must count on your own feelings as you watch similar movies with montages that serve the same purpose. How long do they go on, how many shots and scenelets are in them, and do they feel to you sufficient? And does your interest begin to flag at any point?

Music and Songs

There is one type of montage that goes outside the screenwriter’s reach, and that is the montage that fills a song.

Songs are used to sell movies. Get the right song in a movie, get it to play outside the theater, where people like it, and the producers can boost the movie’s popularity. But where can a song go, if the movie is not a musical? The montage offers a perfect place, for dialogue is unimportant in a montage, and is usually foregone.

In Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid the decision was made to use a song over the ‘love triangle abloom’ montage. The song was famous, and beloved, and popular: ‘Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head.’ But I personally disliked that song, and so to me that montage is hard to watch. And yet the montage must linger to fill up the running time of the recorded song. This might have been about three minutes, which was a standard length for a popular song at the time. Three minutes! that’s three pages of script — an eternity, and so precious in even a feature length movie.

Foreboding and the Montage

In a tale told in words, the talesman could open what is his equivalent to a montage with some such line as,

For three weeks, we were happy, and there wasn’t a cloud in the sky…

We should have known it couldn’t last…

Right away, the audience keys on the phrase, ‘for three weeks.’ So it ends in three weeks? What will happen then? And why? This provokes in us a sense of foreboding, a tension and suspense. We know the cloud is coming, and we know when it will come.

This is built in to the nature of tales told in words as we have developed them. We use the past tense, and so a period of time, when we sum it up, will normally begin with a reference to its duration.

Movies unreel in present tense, so this path is not allowed us as screenwriters, with one exception. Where a tale is told in flashback structure, the flashback does happen in past tense, and is moreover narrated. The voice of the narrator, when used, can reproduce the exact phrasing of the montage in tales told in words:

For three weeks, we were happy, and there wasn’t a cloud in the sky…

We should have known it couldn’t last…

If you watch many Hollywood movies produced in the late 1940s, when the flashback was in vogue, you will find this tactic used extensively.

The flashback is out of favor now, though, and so this avenue is available to only the rare screenplay.

(Composed on keyboard Sunday, June 15, 2008)

The Screenplay: Format

General guidelines on spacing and margins

The screenplay is typed in a specific format. In the Golden Age of the Hollywood studios, 1927–1960, different studios had different formats, though they all conformed in general to the forms used today. Preston Sturges and other oddballs and independents made their own rules, of course, and the last few ‘scenario directors’ had the screenplays written as they shot, and shot in continuity sequence.

Font

The old style typewriters used Courier 10-pitch, which is 12 point. That or some equivalent (Courier New from Microsoft, or Courier Dark from Hewlett-Packard) is what you should use.

The type is monospaced and this helps to make all the pages uniform. Most of these formatting guidelines work toward that same end, so that when a producer picks up a script he can look at the page count and get right off a good idea how long the produced movie should run.

Line Spacing

The script is printed single-space.

Skip lines after a Scene Heading or Slugline, after a Speech of dialogue, and in between paragraphs of description.

Page Margins

Top and bottom margins run an inch or more.

The description paragraphs run no more than 65 characters. This is as wide as the script gets, though if scene numbers are added, they go outside those dimensions. For beginning screenwriters who will be writing on spec, don’t worry about scene numbers. (Software that is designed especially for composing and printing screenplays can add scene numbers dynamically.)

Names of Speakers are indented from the margin so that they will approximate centered. Centering them is an acceptable shortcut, though professionals insist that the names should all line up, i.e., they are all indented the same distance from the left margin.

Parenthetical paragraphs are indented not quite so much as the Names of Speakers.

Dialogue is indented not quite so much as Parentheticals.

Transitional directions such as FADE OUT, DISSOLVE TO, and the like, are flush right, lining up with the end of the 65-character description paragraphs.

Capitals

Scene Headings, Transitional directions, and the Names of Speakers are all printed in ALL CAPITAL letters.

Software

In general, if you use a template for Microsoft Word or OpenOffice.org, or if you use a program that has been designed especially for writing screenplays, you can rely upon the default layouts you are given.

Don’t Sweat

Most beginners are worried most of all about the matter of formatting. In the end, though, you’re better off if you focus on your story and the dramatic potential of your setups and characters.

(Composed on keyboard Saturday, June 14, 2008)

The Screenplay: Software

Word processing for screenwriters

When I was in the business, the #1 software choice for writing screenplays was Final Draft http://www.finaldraft.com but there was also Movie Magic, and an unusual approach in Dramatica (both can be found at http://www.screenplay.com) which is an interactive application helping the screenwriter shape and build his tale. These programs are commercial and cost money, though they probably have trial versions available.

Recently Celtx http://www.celtx.com has achieved 1.0 version status, and is open source and free of charge.

There are also word-processing programs that have predefined screenplay modes. One I like very much is Scrivener http://www.literatureandlatte.com which is available only for OSX and the Macintosh platform. Scrivener is commercial and costs money, and does have a trial period.

I’m sure there are other programs designed for screenwriters as well, which will serve the purpose.

In addition to these choices, which handle all the formatting and page breaks for you, there is also the path of turning a general purpose word-processor into a screenwriting machine. Microsoft’s Word (available for MS-Windows OS and OSX, commercial and costing money) and OpenOffice.org http://www.openoffice.org (which is open-source and free of charge), along with other word processing applications, can work with ‘styles’ or ‘style sheets’ which are paragraph styles whose characteristics you can alter and name. A ‘Scene_Heading’ or ‘slugline’ paragraph style can be defined that has the proper spacing and is ALL CAPS; when you hit Enter or Return at the end of a Scene_Heading it can make a ‘Description’ or ‘Action’ paragraph. A ‘Speaker’ paragraph can lead to a ‘Talk’ paragraph, which can then lead to another ‘Speaker’ paragraph.

If you Google for them, you’ll probably find that some fellow-screenwriters have posted templates for writing screenplays with Microsoft Word. Bear in mind that most MS-Word templates also open in OpenOffice.org as well.

For OpenOffice.org screenplay templates, here are a few links:
http://www.zoetrope.com/files/pri/168/scr2.odt
http://www.geocities.com/n2geoff/OO/oo.html
http://extensions.services.openoffice.org/project/scr2

I haven’t tested any of these myself, as I made my own ’way back when.

It’s also possible for those of you who can handle coding HTML to create such a file for your screenplays, but such files wouldn’t print out to industry standards. If you’re only interested in writing a screenplay as a proto-draft for a tale you mean to end as a novel, though, formatting is less important to you.

(Composed on keyboard Friday, June 13, 2008)

The Screenplay: Exits and Polarity

Saying Goodbye to a character mirrors saying Hello

The Last Laugh

Courteous people, when they take their leave, always make sure to say ‘Goodbye.’ It is a courtesy to the characters in a screenplay and movie to say goodbye to them too, when they leave the frame for the last time.

In general, taking leave of characters or ‘exiting’ them, is not so important as introducing them in their first Entrance. The extended death scene of the theatrical ham has been the subject of ridicule for a few centuries now. And yet it is effective still: in current action-blockbuster-genre pictures, it is normal for the screenwriter and others in the crew to devise and stage an elaborate, particularly sadistic way for the villain to die.

Mirrors and Passages

We can look at any character’s exit as a mirror to his entrance, and this gives us a chance to consider his character arc or polarity. It is a general practice in talesmanship, to make a character’s end point as far from his beginning as possible. The miser of Act I will be the philanthropist of Act III; the prim spinster will be the open, loving woman; the villainous billionaire will end a pauper. Some of these arcs involve ‘comeuppance,’ the strategy of devising cruel paybacks for characters the audience is taught to dislike, and who represent people and institutions that the audience feel are oppressing them in their real lives.

Some of these arcs involve the common theme of ‘redemption’ in today’s movies. The hero is introduced with a flaw, the flaw arises from some past wound; before the end credits roll, the hero will have faced the old wound and begun to heal it, and made up for his flaw.

Some of these arcs involve the moral or personal progress of the characters, especially the hero. This is often the case in movies that are tales of a man, or character studies. The hero gains what he lacks. Sometimes, when the hero is anti-hero, he will pay for his hubris or other flaw.

The hero will start out low and end high, or vice-versa. He will start poor and end rich, he will start alone and end in love, he will start ordinary and end extraordinary, he will start as a fool and end as a sage.

And along with the hero, the audience will grow rich, be loved, uncommon, and wise.

In order to fix this progress in full cinematic terms, the hero’s Entrance and his Exit can be designed so as to epitomize these twin doors.

(Composed on keyboard Thursday, June 12, 2008)

The Screenplay: Swipes and Apes

Learn by copying

To paraphrase Robert Louis Stevenson, he learned his craft by ‘playing the sedulous ape’ to the writers he most admired. He would try to rewrite them; cut up their texts and try to restructure them; copy them out longhand.

The same strategy is best to learn the first things about screenwriting.

Plans not Buildings

A screenplay to its movie is like the blueprint to a finished building. Just because you can see a building doesn’t mean you can read its plans, and so we shouldn’t think that just because we have watched a lot of movies we should be able to write screenplays — or even know how to put together a screenplay.

The movie assaults our senses with waves of information. The screenplay represents only a thin skeletal line of that mass.

So I would invite any learning screenwriter to try these strategies:

1. Read Screenplays especially of those movies you enjoy. See where the movie ‘came from.’ One caveat here is that many published screenplays aren’t the screenplay that they took into production, but is a ‘cleaned up’ version of it, that conforms to the finished film. You don’t want that; you want to see what the screenwriter(s) made before the first shot was taken.
   There are many screenplays available online. Try to find version in Adobe Acrobat’s pdf format, to see the layout preserved.
2. Write Screenplays of movies you have seen. Do this before you read the screenplays themselves, if you can find them. This is an exercise in seeing just how much of all the film contains is to be found in the screenplay. Dialogue won’t, probably, differ much, but in the approach to description, and how much is too much, you’ll find a world of difference between what you as a beginner will put down, and what the pros who got paid for the job did.
3. Look to the Past for scripts of old movies. The form was a lot different in the studio era, when the screenwriters knew it would be produced (at least they had fair odds) and didn’t write ‘on spec’ with the aim of catching a producer or star’s eye with their flashy prose. The old ‘masters’ also were much more succinct than today’s screenwriters, both in terms of the scene level and the level of the film as a whole. Movies were shorter back then, and screenwriters knew how to condense and pack in their information.
4. Read Adaptations of novels and plays that have been turned into movies. Watch the movies and read the screenplays of those movies, and read the books and plays too. This will teach you a lot about condensing and rearranging material. When you write your own screenplays, you will produce some that have structural problems. The adaptations are a guide for how to do it. Characters will be added, dropped, or combined; major subplots will be dropped.

(Composed on keyboard Wednesday, June 11, 2008)

The Screenplay: The Entrance

The first appearance of characters

The First Impression

The first time we meet someone, we form an impression of them, make a judgment, perhaps. This first impression fills a hole: where we know nothing of a person, we want to know something. But as soon as that hole of ignorance is filled, we think we know that person. And overcoming that impression, changing it in the light of further meetings or information, involves two acts: we must remove the prior impression, and we must then adopt the new impression. But to a certain extent that first impression lingers; the new impression lies over it, atop it, but the first impression still can glimmer through, its contours still apparent through the new impression.

For this reason, it is important to make our first impression an informed and (more or less) correct one.

For the same reason, it is important for us to make a true and useful impression on those we meet for the first time.

Nowhere is this truer than in tales in general; in dramatically-cast tales more properly; in movies specifically.

Character Introductions

In every tale, the talesman introduces us the audience to his characters for the first time. This is true even of those characters we have met before in other tales, for every talesman has his own view of the characters he tells us about, and every talesman will change his views of those characters, slightly, subtly, or boldly, each time he tells us about them.

In tales told in words, the talesman has a limited palette of tools with which to introduce us to his characters. For he has but words, after all.

Thus for the wordsmith, he can choose, broadly, between the direct introduction and the indirect.

Direct Introduction

The direct introduction of a character happens just the way we meet someone in person. A man appears; he looks a certain way and holds himself a certain way. He is dressed a certain way, and we find him in a certain setting. He does certain things, and says certain things, and from the sum of all these particulars, we build an idea of who this man is, and how we feel about him.

Indirect Introduction

The indirect introduction of a character comes about when we learn something of a man before we see him in person. We hear someone speak of him, or we read about him. We see the results of something that he did, and begin to form an impression of the man who did it.

Partial Introduction

Between the direct and the indirect introduction is the partial introduction when we gain only a partial view of a man and are denied the other parts of a meeting. We might hear his voice, but not see him. We might see his shadow only. We might see him from afar without being able to make out the details of his appearance, or without being able to hear what it is he says.

The Drama and the Entrance

In the theater, we meet characters in a double aspect, for we see them both as actors and as the characters the actors play. In some cases we have met the actor before, but not the character. Or we may have met the character but not the actor, for instance in a new staging of a play we have seen before, with a new cast.

The theater has always had its stars, and the best-loved of those stars were gladly greeted when they first came on stage in a performance. And they were applauded and cheered, which put the tale on hold; for those moments there was no tale, no play, only the star and his public.

So it made sense for the playwrights to design flourishing entrances for their stars, which would cover the applause, and allow the actor to acknowledge his fans and bring them back into the tale. It is also a byword that stars have big heads and will look over proffered plays with an eye toward only their own parts. A play that offers the star a grand entrance will appeal more than that same play with an insignificant entrance.

The Drama and the Movie

Now, film offers all the dramatic potential of the stage (saving only the direct interaction of the actor with the audience) and more, for in a movie the character can be introduced directly, indirectly, or partially. This comes of the fact that the film controls the eyes and ears of the audience to greater extent; it is almost absolute, except that some people in the theater can look away, talk over the movie, or be caught looking in the wrong part of the screen.

Therefore the screenwriter must consider carefully the entrances of his main characters, and what first impressions these entrances will create in the audience.

For Screenplays Not Destined For the Screen

For talesmen who are writing a screenplay as a proto-draft, he need not work so hard on his characters’ entrances, as all he will end up with is what he can do with words when he writes his final drafts.

(Composed on keyboard Tuesday, June 10, 2008)

The Screenplay: The End

End with a flourish, end early, end decisively

Every tale has its end. The end of the tale of a man is, the last deed of the man in his life; the tale is then wrapped up with a farewell or envoi that reflects, in brief, on how important the man and his deeds were to the rest of us. The end of the tale of an action is the conclusion of that action, which comes when the goal is won or lost beyond question; the tale is then wrapped up with an envoi that tells, in brief, of the consequences of that gain or loss to those involved.

The envoi is optional; it is a way the talesman brings his audience gently back from the tale’s world into their own, and may be also a way for the talesman to ask his audience to reflect on the tale in light of their world, and gain wisdom or deeper feeling in themselves for having heard the tale.

In a movie, the end credits release us in the audience back to our real world. We get out of our seats and file out of the theater into the day, or night, passing through the lobby of the theater, perhaps. Since we watch a movie in a group, we have the chance to discuss the movie and its tale as we leave, and in the moments afterward.

The envoi, then, is a luxury in a movie. And since the movie and its screenplay are so straitened for time and pages, the luxury of the envoi is generally foregone. Only when the true end to the tale leaves a false taste in the mouth of the audience, is the envoi needed. This comes when the true consequences of the end are not obvious from the end. The hero gains his goal, but is gravely wounded, and far from home; the envoi, in a brief scene (perhaps no more than one shot), tells us of his homecoming, healthy once more. Another kind of ‘false taste’ can come when the mood of the tale’s end is not the mood of the final consequences of victory or defeat. The actual moment of the end may be bitter, though it comes with victory, and then it’s best to let us in the audience leave on a somewhat brighter, happier note with an envoi.

The Flourish of the End

The end of a movie or screenplay that has no envoi, ends abruptly. It counts on the end credits to give its audience the chance to move gently back to our world. Even as the movie should open with a gripping image that straight off plunges us into the tale’s world, so the movie should end on another gripping image.

The question of the Image is something that writers of words only rarely deal with. Some writers, those more dramatic in their bent, deal with images readily. But movies are images blent with sound, moving in real time before their audience; this makes the Image vital. The great filmmaker is the one who can create vivid, unforgettable Images in a string through his movie. The great screenwriter is the one who offers the rest of the crew the opportunity to create those Images.

This makes it vital for those of us who write screenplays with an eye to seeing them produced as movies, to envision at all times how the movie will look, as if we had the movie projected before our mind’s eye.

The last image a movie gives us before the credits roll, is the one that lingers as we leave the theater and rejoin our own lives. It is the movie’s most important image (as the opening image is its second most important).

End Early

Even as the shortness of the screenplay demands that the screenwriter leave each scene as early as he can, and earlier than he would like, so too it asks that he leave the tale early. The final sequence should be so constructed that any repercussions and consequences of the end are implied, and will unfold in the minds of the audience as we get up and walk away from the screen — even in the hours and days to come.

An abrupt, early end is a strong one; a straggling, protracted end is weak. Better to err on the side of ending too early than outstaying your movie’s welcome.

There is a fault of commercial Hollywood movies of the past quarter-century or so, that they offer us not one ending, but several. This is a great flaw of the current cinema. Does it come from indecisiveness, from filmmakers who haven’t made up their mind which scene should end the movie? Does it come from some misunderstanding of how we watch and understand movies? Does it come from poor organization of the scenes of the screenplay? Does it come from sloppiness?

I suspect all these factors contribute to the trend. There is also the (thoroughly mistaken) notion, maybe, that if people are asked to pay high prices for tickets, they should be given ‘value for their money’ in the form of extra minutes! extra scenes! extra endings! More and more! seems to be in back of some of these endings, for example the horror film that kills the monster at the end, only to have the monster arise again and need to be killed one more time. One more shock! One more killing!

This philosophy trades the experience of the moment for the enjoyment of the hours and days to come. It is part of the general notion of the movie as a thrill ride rather than as a tale told and enjoyed. It makes sense that if the movie is nothing more than an experience, like a roller-coaster, that more time on the ride, and one more loop-the-loop, will give us in the audience more enjoyment for our money. Under this philosophy, the movie is nothing but a string of exciting (arousing, scary, tearful, etc.) moments or scenes. The more the merrier!

But this idea of the movie as spectacle, ‘no more than a circus parade’ in the words of a famous court decision in the USA in the earliest days of commercial cinema, falls outside the realm of talesmanship. It may be true; it may be a valid form of moviemaking; it may well appeal to many moviegoers. But I have nothing more to say of that.

(Composed on keyboard Monday, June 9, 2008)