Capstone Week 10: The Great Dialogue Lull

Cover art of the re-released edition.

I’ve been spending my time, outside of schoolwork, workwork and Halloween prep, converting all of the dialogue in my episode 1 demarcation of the book into proper script-dialogue and plotting out the scenes. I don’t have much else to report at this point, I haven’t had much time to give the new material I’ve been handed the reading it deserves, and although my final ILL book arrived it might as well have been lost in transit for all the help it contains.

I have noticed I’ve become better at understanding screenplays, though, especially in their structure. One of my classes is a creative writing workshop, and when one of the other students gave us all a screenplay to review, I realized that the big problem with it was that the conflict didn’t follow after the introduction of the characters, and if that were fixed everything else would fall into place. In a fit of rare luck, I was able to explain this to the writer and how they could straighten the backbone of the script so that the beginning and end were the same but the driving force of the story was constant, and they were so impressed they took notes for the sake of editor-chiropracty.

It wasn’t until then, seeing their reaction, that I appreciated how much I’ve learned in the last few weeks, and how much I’ve retained on top of that. When I graduate I’m going to have to do all of my learning this way, and it’s been an encouraging dip into autodidactery.

Better updates forthcoming, once the uninteresting writerly bits have been properly tended.

Capstone Week 9: Treatment, Outline, Prep Stages

I don't have much to report now that the original research is over, although I spoke with Jason and he gave me a big list of work on selling scripts to companies and getting them produced in the real world that I'm going to shuffle through in the next couple weeks as I hammer out the actual script. I've reread the whole book now, and written out a full shorthand treatment of every scene in it, which I've used to cut the whole thing into four episodes. Taking some of what I've learned, I've already planned to throw a couple characters and a C-plot out of the narrative entirely, but my current adaptational philosophy is that I'm only chopping out the things that a fan wouldn't really miss.

The story itself divides pretty nicely between the four either way, especially when I've reordered a B-plot to play out alongside the main events. I never appreciated how good Peter Watts was at cliffhangers and high tension until I had to sit in his chair and poke at his creations so closely. I think this will do well with the main character as a narrator, too, and I'm hoping to preserve a few of my favorite passages in the book because the dialogue and prose are wonderful.

Here are some of my favorite sections from the online version:

Capstone Week 8: An End to Research

I’ve received The Art of Adaptation: Turning Fact and Fiction into film and Talk the Talk, which I believe rounds out my research for this project. (Continuing the trend of perceived passive-aggression from the interlibrarians, I can’t help but notice that Art is due at the 1st of next month and Talk is due at the end. Was there a typo, or are they actively messing with me?)

But now that my preparatory work’s been finished, I’m trying to empty out my schedule for the actual scriptwriting. I’ve asked to have my work hours cut down, I’m trying to vanquish all of my lesser homework assignments, and I’m going to see my advisor this week with an outline of the novel and how I want the structure of the script to play out. To be honest I feel a little daunted by this, because it involves parsing an entire novel of text, and my computer won’t run Final Draft.

As for my one remaining book, Weaver’s Return of the B Science Fiction and Horror Heroes, I’m afraid it’s wound up being a very thick celebration of individual directors, and doesn’t have much to say about writing or the SF film at all. Thankfully, The Art of Adaptation and Talk the Talk are much more illuminating. Here’s my exegesis:

Talk the Talk surprised me by being a workbook, mostly concerned with exercises and in large friendly print. It’s a book that prefaces its physics metaphors with reassurances, in case the reader cringes away in fear, and most of its spoils were in the introductions to its twenty brief chapters. Penniston sees human interaction on the screen and off as the interplay of “high status players” and “low status players” (51), people who have different positions on different totem-poles and adjust their behavior to each other. Writing believable dialogue is a matter of combining these things; “A good line of dialogue manifests the sum of all forces ... acting on a character at a particular moment.” (125), and at times that means giving them a certain amount of complicated situations to tackle.

The most important line is at the very beginning, though, and I already knew it but had never heard someone write it so wonderfully: “People do not talk in prose” (4). This is the problem I’ve found in all sorts of amateur work, my own included, and it’s part of what makes my own writing so opaque and obscure; I feel like if my characters ever actually exposited something I’d be breaking the audience’s trust. Of course that’s silly, but it’s that kind of rigid near-superstition that defines a style.

Apart from that, my favorite part of the book was something I’d never considered before, and which makes the whole practice of writing characters a lot clearer to me: “To control your plot, do not try to control your characters. Instead, try to control the balance of forces acting on your characters. If you do this deftly, the characters will maneuver completely on their own. It’s as if you are playing one of those marble-in-a-maze games: If you tilt the toy in the right direction, the marble will move where you want it to go (without you ever having to touch it)” (176). Being the shadowy director of character-fates has always appealed to me, but thinking of it that literally had never occured to me.

Of course, with someone else’s characters this isn’t the most useful advice. The Art of Adaptation includes a section on lowering the number of characters in the story, but the full cast of Blindsight numbers less than ten people if I remember correctly, so melting them into composites feels a little pointless. The book as a whole is much more useful, and broadly interested in finding new ways to adapt plays, books, real events and older movies into modern film. Some of this involves things I’ve already read about, like the three-act structure and A and B-plots, but there was a special depth here, the kind that pointed out that a “B story also has a three-act structure” (90) and made me stop and think for a minute.

“Have you ever noticed,” Seger asks, “that a book may take fifty or one hundred pages to give you the information that you get in three minutes of film?” (16). This is something I’ve become more aware of in the last few weeks, especially as an argument for the moral righteousness of fanfiction; a story about an original character needs to establish who they are and why the reader should care before it can do anything interesting, while a story about Batman can cut to the action immediately. In film, everything can be done in parallel, and I want to use that to cut out what exposition lingers in the novel. (Although, to be fair to Watts, the book doesn’t really care about the mechanics of the spaceship when it can deal with psychology.)

There’s some useful advice on filling time and writing material that the original author didn’t include, on the logic that “[some] scenes are implied when a character briefly mentions a friend, or some incident from childhood, or simply says she or he had a bad day at work. All of these memories can be made into scenes” (102). I would jump at the opportunity to work with this and turn some of the narrator-protagonist’s memories into their own plot, but then I remembered that a good chunk of the novel is devoted to a B-plot of flashbacks into his failing relationship anyway. I’m not sure I really want to include that, or whether or not I’d have to change it considering both it and the main plot end poorly for everyone.

Works Cited

Seger, L. (2011). The art of adaptation: Turning fact and fiction into film. Macmillan. Chicago

Penniston, P. (2010). Talk the Talk: A Dialogue Workshop for Scriptwriters. Michael Wiese Productions.

Art, Copy, Rhetoric and Entertainment

Art and Copy was an interesting change of pace from The Persuaders, especially in theme. It’s not as objective, in that it doesn’t really care about bringing in people who dislike the industry, but as an attempt to justify that industry that makes perfect sense. And the enthusiasm of the interviewees is really contagious, especially considering that advertisers as a whole are generally seen as unpalatable, irritating people.

A lot of the descriptions of advertising done well reminded me of other, more down-to-earth communicators, like historical criers, newspaper boys, bards and jesters. These people could be just as annoying as any YouTube advertisement, but it was taken for granted that any of them who irritated people were just bad at their jobs. No one blames comedians if an awful open-mic act bombs, and the same goes for any other art-form people take seriously. There’s at least a leg to stand on here if you’re an avowed anticonsumerist, and I think the implication toward the end that if the public space isn’t taken up by advertising it’ll be taken up by anti-government rhetoric is a really silly dismissal of communism, but for the average person complaining about the ten-second wait on a YouTube video, the problem isn’t that they’re being sold something but that there’s no charm or excitement in the pitch.

The idea that “We are in the art business when we do it well” deserves to be a maxim for most crafts, really. When I heard that, I realized that I’d never thought of a well-made movie trailer as an advertisement, and I actively enjoyed many more than the films they represented. They’re still trying to sell something to me, but I agree that it’s worth selling.

A perfect example of a trailer whose movie cannot possibly be as good.

That said, I don’t think I’d want to live in a world of extremely charming, well-made advertisements. There’s something scary about the idea that “It’s like you’re in water. It’s around you, it’s going to happen to you”, and a world of friendly, entertaining material selling me things I don’t need sounds like the worst kind of overstimulating chaos. I appreciate the existence of terrible ads, the ones that exist to fill up webpage sidebars or hold up my videos, if only because they remind me to be skeptical of the things I see. There’s a reason, after all, that “trying to sell you something” is a negative description.

Capstone Week 7: I Am Legend and Scene Setters

My latest loan-books haven’t arrived yet, including Talk the Talk, but I’ve managed to find an e-book of Film Adaptation and Its Discontents. I’ve realized I’m almost through my list of research materials, maybe already finished with it, and I have no idea where the time’s gone. I do think I’ve learned the state of thought on adaptation, and the basics of the technique, although there are probably more specific approaches I’m failing to notice.

I also, incidentally, watched I Am Legend this week, and my roommate was incensed enough by its state as a bad adaptation that he made me watch The Last Man on Earth, the ‘60s Vincent Price adaptation of the same novel. From watching both and talking them over with him, I’m sure that The Last Man is a much more faithful adaptation, but I like Will Smith’s hunting-deer-in-the-city version, and I think Price’s is very silly and nestled in the pulp tradition. And the original ending of I Am Legend, I learned as a kid, was replaced after it sunk with test audiences - no longer would the twist be that the monsters were also people and they considered the protagonist to be the boogeyman (hence the title), but that the main character sacrificed himself to save aaall humanity and became a legend.

I’ve learned that sometimes bad adaptation choices, the kind that stamp on the important points and key meanings of the story instead of the supporting details and moving parts of it, aren’t really in the writer’s hands at all.

I can't look at this without thinking about The Flintstones.

Moving onto the book, most of the chapters are about specific works or kinds of work, like “The Word Made Film” (Passion of the Christ) or “Entry-Level Dickens”. The most important chapter, in my survey, has been “The Adapter as Auteur”, in that it has a philosophy no other books seem to. The idea of the chapter, quickly, is that there have historically been auteurs and “metteurs-en-scène” (236), the people who merely create the scenes based on the literary work of other people, taking all of the meaning built by others and ushering it forth in a slightly different form. This was a distinction in the early days of French cinema that applied to directors more than screenwriters, but the idea of adaptation-as-beneath-us still underlied it.

Yet, Leitch points out, we don't really think of Hitchcock as an adapter, even though "Among his fourteen films before his breakout thriller The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934), only two—The Ring (1927) and Champagne (1928)—were based on original screenplays" (237). Hitchcock isn't regarded as a hack writer or someone who merely sets the scene for an already-determined story, and he's not alone in that. Adaptation involves in it the opportunity to put something of yourself into the finished product, and ironically, if you don't, people will be more likely to think you're slacking off. After all, anyone can transcribe stuff that's already written, right?

Interestingly, for Leitch this conflict extends past the audience and into the adapter's relationship with the author, and he brings up Kubrick to show that his rise to prominence was influenced by his "increasingly skilled infighting [on] ... Spartacus (1960), Lolita (1962), and Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964)." (240) More than that, Kubrick had found a style of adaptation that he stuck to consistently, in which all of the works he turned into film became part of a recognizable strain, and were translated not just into movies but into Kubrick movies.

It never occurred to me to think of it that way, but if I could figure out how to make something into a Johnson movie, I think I'd be golden. I'm pretty sure that only comes with experience in the form, though.

Speaking of that, I realized I've never shown a picture of an alien from Blindsight, so here's a stuffed one someone made on DeviantART:

For once, a monster that's Lovecraftian because of its personality and internal workings more than its startle factor without giving up any of the tentacled space-terror. Who says there's no such thing as a happy middle?

Work Cited

Leitch, T. (2009). Film adaptation and its discontents: from Gone with the Wind to The Passion of the Christ. JHU Press.

Capstone Week 6: The Grit of Screenwriting and the Joys of SF

I received another book, ordering my next batch once I’ve posted this. The due dates keep shrinking, and I can tell that the library’s services are getting a little tired of me juggling the books they have to promise to keep safe to all of their sibling-establishments. Part of me wonders how low I can bring that deadline. If they made me read these things for just an hour and hand them back immediately afterward to be shipped away, it might make it easier to get things out of them.

(There’s also a little sticker on the paper strap it comes with, telling me DO NOT REMOVE THIS STRAP. I feel a little accused by that. It’s as if they’ve just now discovered I have a criminal record for mishandling my loans. I have a feeling sooner or later they’ll start leering at me, and I’ll find a cut-out of the horse’s head from the cover of Black Beauty in my bed.)

The book this time is Writing the Science Fiction Film by Robert Grant. It’s written largely for people who are making original offerings, but it covers all of its scriptwriting bases pretty strongly. Funny enough, there’s a section on writing aliens which complains about the proshetic-forehead school of extraterrestrials in much the same way I did last week. Aside from that, here’s what I took from it:

The first ten pages of any script, and of any movie, are the most important ones. There’s a lot of work to be done in them establishing everything the audience needs to know about the protagonist, world, rules, theme, and possibly the antagonists. Part of this is about writing for the people who’ll be accepting or rejecting your script, and that means paring down everything that isn’t completely necessary to the story. Grant puts it very bluntly (and very helpfully) as “[I]f there’s one single trick to better screenwriting, it’s this; [sic] reduce every sentence down to its absolute essence, and use the fewest possible words to make the greatest possible impact” (142); I already have a decent idea for an opening scene which mirrors one of the earlier scenes of the novel. There are also plenty of sections in the story in the main character’s past from which to establish a status quo.

But the writing should be clear, no vague verbs, no -ings, no “starts to”s, no adverbs. Exposition should be given to the audience only when they need it, and the pill should be hidden deep in some especially fun and engaging applesauce. Grant recommends a book on writing dialogue instead of going into it himself, a volume by Penny Penniston called Talk the Talk.

The part that I’m trying my hardest to chew on at present is the very simple question “What happens if the hero fails?” (159). This is very difficult because, in a sense, the hero does fail. He achieves a pyrrhic victory as the lone survivor of his ship, with the aliens kept away from the rest of humanity, but that doesn’t imply much achievement because I don’t think the aliens were that interested in Earth anyway. I’ll probably have to play up the horror of them to make them a broader threat, unless I’m just misremembering them.

And, separately, some bits I really enjoyed as a science fiction writer, but which I don’t have much to comment about in terms of this project.

• “No one will thank you if your script is bland in tone.” (152)
• “It doesn’t matter if the physics of your world aren’t real as long as they are consistent and you never break your own rules.” (86)
• “The main character in your story should be the only person this story could possibly happen to.” (38)
• “Despite the apocryphal nature of a lot of science fiction, there is usually a positive message. There’s a promise that... we can fight our way through any adversity and emerge on the other side with our humanity intact... moving on with a new measure of peace, understanding, and, above all, hope.” (73)

Work Cited

Grant, R. (2013) Writing the science fiction film. Michael Wiese Productions.