Story =/ Narrative?

FAR CRY 3 has a spectacular case of what Clint Hocking calls "ludo-narrative dissonance." That's a fancy phrase for when the gameplay is at odds with the story. The story is about a callow college boy who is out to save his friends, who have been kidnapped by bandits. The gameplay is about destroying bandit camps so you can clear out more territory and get better weapons, and hunting wild animals so you can upgrade your ammo pouches.

The gameplay is really tight and the bandit camps become puzzles: how do you knock off the maximum number of bandits without alerting them to their danger? The problem is that you are in no hurry to liberate your friends. In fact, you do the story missions last. That way, you'll be maximally geared up when you do them. To heck with your friends! They'll still be there when you get to them, right?

 In Mass Effect 3, I recall, the LND got so extreme that I realized that whenever the game told me that a given mission to save the galaxy from the Reapers was super-urgent, that meant I should absolutely not do that mission until I'd done all the sidequests. Many of the sidequests went away the moment you did the story mission.

 In this Game Informer interview, Mark Thompson, the Narrative Director, says they're going to try to sync up the player's motivation with the player character's motivation. Sounds like a good idea, eh?

In related news, Tom Abernathy and Richard Rouse III made some good points in their GDC talk "Death to Three Act Structure". Their point is that game players experience story differently than movie watches. They remember characters and moments better than they remember plot:

MS User Researcher Deborah Hendersen did a study a couple of years ago that might help to answer that question. She discovered that players really hardly remember the specific plots of the games they play. When asked “tell me the plot of your favorite game” players were unable to talk at length or with much accuracy. However, they were *very* able to recall the plots of movies and TV shows they loved.

And, of course, in open world games, it's not really possible to tell a three act story -- you have no idea in what order the player will encounter your narrative material.

So, focus on great characters and great moments.

The more I know about story, the more I realize that it isn't everything.

Both the interview and the GDC talk are worth checking out. 

Do Not Do This

Q. I am trying to get in touch with Bill Prady and it appears from some Google searches you know him.

I have 6 scripts attached for The Big Bang Theory. They would be 6 of the best episodes ever, and the one entitled [snip] will win an Emmy for Mrs. Cuoco. I implore you to just start reading it, it encompasses everything the Big Bang Theory is about.

I realize you folks hear this a lot, but Chuck and Bill really needs to see these. I have a lot more where those came from and many more ideas.

Wow, so many things wrong with this email!

One, do not send attachments to someone who hasn't asked for them. No one practicing good Internet hygiene will open them.

Two, do not send attachments to someone who hasn't asked for them. It is extremely rude. Ask if someone wants to read your spec, then send if they say it's okay. They might ask you to sign a release. They might not read other people's material. I do not read the material of strangers unless they sign a release and pay me for an evaluation. It's not my job. I'm a writer, not an agent or a producer. I occasionally read scripts of writer friends of mine.

(See, "No, I Will Not Read Your F#@%ing Script" by Josh Olson for only some of the many reasons why.)

Three, Bill Prady does not want to read your Big Bang Theory scripts. Bill Prady has an office full of writers generating Big Bang Theory scripts, based on conversations he's had with them about the specific needs of the show. You, on the outside, do not know what these are. Your scripts will read spectacularly wrong to him, no matter how close you think they are.

If your scripts are really excellent, then send the best one to an agent. If she likes it, she'll ask for a spec of a different show, or possibly a spec pilot. No one wants to read more than one script from a show from you. If she likes your two scripts, she might be able to get you work on another half hour sitcom.

Star Treg:TNG famously bought spec scripts from the Cloud, but I've never heard of another show doing that.

Four, just because I wrote up a talk that Bill Prady gave a few years ago, that makes you think I'm on a script-giving basis with him? Oh, if only. I would indeed give him a script I thought was amazing. My own. My wife's. If I thought he was receptive to more than that, I might give him the occasional script by a friend I think is really funny. I might give him one every, oh, five years. You don't want to wear out your welcome. Generally you get one shot.

A friend of ours from high school, for example, is a big deal agent in a specific market niche. We have never sent him a script, because we didn't have anything we thought was perfect for him. We did not want to waste his time. (As luck would have it, he noticed she'd won her second Writer's Guild Award this year, and emailed her.)

Five, never send someone a whole bunch of scripts. What if they read the worst one first? Send the best one. If they want to read more, trust me, they will ask.

How do you know I even watch Big Bang Theory? How would I know if your spec was good or bad? If you asked me to critique your BBT scripts, I would have to refuse, because I don't know the show well enough to judge them.

Six, no one wants to read your spec script without a release. You know why? Because if we were ever to read your script, and didn't have a release from you, and later on we wrote a script that you, for some reason, thought was full of your stolen ideas, then you might sue. You would almost certainly lose the suit, but it would still cost a month and $5,000 to get the lawsuit thrown out of court. I would rather spend that money on Zinfandel.

So I did not open your attachments, and I have deleted your email.

Good luck, eh?

"Do What You Love, and the Money Will Follow"

One of the standard bits of advice that the successful give to the aspiring is "write for yourself, and the money will follow." (Well, except for these guys.) It's a specific case of the broader platitude "Do what you love, and the money will follow."

It's wonderful advice for the successful to follow. Pretty much every breakout success happened because someone believed the world needed something only he or she had -- a personal computer, a better way to index the Web, a story to tell.

And for many people, it is excellent advice. Me, for example. I never really considered the odds against becoming a pro screenwriter. I just kept at it until I could support myself. (And I never had to be completely indifferent to the market; people encouraged me all along the way.) Took longer than I had planned, but now I look at my high school classmates who are doctors and lawyers and bankers, and a lot of them are trying to get out of their business. A friend of mine who's a surgeon is trying to put together a singing and acting career. On a larger scale, while I've made a good living (and sometimes a great one) for, let's say, 14 out of the past 15 years, so many of the businesses that were supposed to be safe turned out to be much sketchier. Who ever thought you could bust your butt for years to become partner at your law firm and then the partners could fire you in a downturn?

The problem with this bit of advice is that you almost never hear from the failures. For everyone who follows their bliss and makes it big -- or makes a living at it, at least -- there are uncounted numbers who follow their bliss and fail horribly. 

I get emails from people who have written all thirteen scripts for the first season of their TV series. Unfortunately, they have no credits, and that's not how you make a TV series. 

The truth is, "follow your bliss, and the money will follow ... if your bliss happens to be something that everyone turns out to want." 

See, the problem is, when Matt Weiner writes MAD MEN or Marc Cherry specs DESPERATE HOUSEWIVES or Sylvester Stallone turns down $100,000 for ROCKY after he's had to sell his dog -- they have something that, in retrospect, the market wanted. What they loved and believed in, other people came to love and believe in, too.

I bet, as well, that a lot of people told Stallone he had a pretty amazing script. And people worked with Marc Cherry to help him make his spec amazing. And Stephen King's wife encouraged him to keep writing, and rescued the manuscript of CARRIE from the fireplace. 

"Follow your bliss" is not a blueprint for monomania. The truth is, nobody succeeds alone. Creating something good and new is a tug-of-war between listening to yourself and listening to everybody else. 

I'm sure Marc Cherry had nine other ideas he would have loved to write in addition to DESPERATE HOUSEWIVES. But he had a sense that DH would make it. I'm sure Matt Weiner has a folder full of ideas crazier than MAD MEN. Even Sylvester Stallone had another idea -- about a troubled vet in a small town with a mean sheriff -- that didn't get picked up till he was a star.

It is true that you have to write what you love. If you're not loving what you're writing, probably no one else will like it either. (Unless you're a neurotic genius who never likes their own work, but it's really good anyway. But that's rarer than you might think.) If you're bored, the audience will be, too. And life is too short to write stuff you're bored by. Why go through the trouble of being a writer if you're bored? I've never turned in something I hated. 

But I have sometimes had to figure out what I loved about a project. Most pro writers rarely turn down work. That doesn't mean we're whores or hacks. It means we have a talent for finding what we truly love in the material we're hired to work on. 

That's what I do when I consult on story: I try to find what I love in the other guy's work, and help him or her carve it out of what is ordinary and stale. It's not my job to say, "Well, I woulda done it this way." 

(And, by the way, "hack" isn't the insult you might think it is, not among pro writers. I think most of us respect the ability to hack it out -- to turn in something that's at least shootable, on time, regardless of whether the Muse is taking our calls.)

But you have to learn how to listen. As Rabbi Hillel said, "If I am not for me, who am I? If I am not for other people, what am I?"

I Like a Cheese Knife

I have a strange brain. Scansion sets me off. Today I saw a cheese knife at the Atwater market, and immediately an old pop song popped into my head. See if you can figure out what it was. It went something like, "I like a cheese knife, I like to boogie..."

This happens all the time. Every time I see the phrase "Philadelphia cheese steak," I hear a song by Elton John. With slightly different lyrics.

Philadelphia cheese steak, I luh, uh, uv you, yes I do.

I suppose this is what comes of writing poetry in high school. Or possibly this is why I wrote poetry in high school.

How I Know I'm In the Right Business....

Whitney:  "Did you see that video I sent you a link to?"

Me:  "Er, no. I, uh, might have played, like, 24 hours of Crusader Kings 2 this weekend."

Whitney:  "Good for you, man!"

Cryface

The other observation I had watching HUNGER GAMES:  CATCHING FIRE was that women make much more interesting action heroes than, say, men. Why:

Women are allowed to be really upset. They can still shoot the bad guys full of arrows. Katniss Everdeen spends a lot of time being really really upset. And then she shoots some people full of arrows, and then she blows a lot of stuff up.

Women heroes can kick bad guys in the balls. They can be really, really effective spies. But, then:

I mean, theoretically, guy action heroes could have feelings. But most of them are all, yippee kay yay, mother f***ers:

I much prefer writing female action heroes, frankly. More interesting for me as a writer.

It's not like this in every culture. The French Canadian show 19-2 has cops who talk about their feelings. 

But, in English, it seems like it is very unmanly to have feelings, unless your buddy has just had his head blown off, in which it's okay, so long as you then go into a rage and make them pay.

So, there you go.

Hunger Games: Catching Fire: Spectacle vs. Story

Yep, we watched it. And it was a lot of fun.

I would like to point out that this is a movie starring a woman, that grossed $424 million domestic and $864 million worldwide. So, given the right vehicle and the right franchise, women can be action stars. They make a different kind of action star, but that's my second post.

This post has to do with story vs. spectacle. So that means it has a SPOILER, k?

.
.
.
.
.

The Latin phrase deus ex machina means "god from the machine." In many ancient Greek plays, it seems, various complications would ensue and ensue, until in the end it looked like nothing was going to get resolved. Then a god would descend from Mount Olympos and put everything in its place. The "machine" was a contraption that allowed an actor to be flown out over the stage using a crane.

Hence, ἀπὸ μηχανῆς θεός, which translates to "deus ex machina."

In HUNGER GAMES, CATCHING FIRE, our heroine, Katniss Everdeen, is unwillingly dragged back into the Hunger Games. Philip Seymour Hoffman, playing the world's worst public relations man, has convinced the evil President that they can destroy her as a symbol of revolution if they can first get her to kill all her buddies.

Naturally she spends a great deal of time being upset about this, and then spends a good deal of time in the games trying her best not to kill anyone. And then she suddenly figures out how to blow up the fancy high-tech arena in which the Games take place, something on which she has spent absolutely no apparent thought until the last reel of the film.

Just as the roof is caving in, you might be thinking, well, how is she going to get out of this? But no worries! Because it turns out that Philip Seymour Hoffman is part of the revolution! And he is descending out of the sky in a rocketship to rescue Katniss! Yay!

Philip Seymour Hoffman ex machina.

I bring this up not to complain that HG: CF is a bad movie, or even a bad story. Structurally, it does have a big problem. The heroine doesn't seem to have a positive goal or a plan throughout the movie, just a point of view ("this sucks!"). And she does not motivate the ending.

But the kids seem to like it, to the tune of $865,000,000. (It made another million while you were reading this post.)

What does the movie have? Well, it has a character we really like, with a serious problem. It has a hate-able villain. It's got a romantic triangle. It creates a world that is recognizable as a dark reflection of our own. There are horribly rich rich people, terribly poor poor people, and bread and circuses. (As the Romans said, panem et circenses; why do you think it's called "Panem"?)

It has spectacle.

Movies are spectacles at least as much as they are stories. A movie can survive on spectacle alone. See the TRANSFORMERS franchise, and the STAR WARS prequels, both of which had far, far worse stories than HG: CF.

What I'm suggesting here is really that we, as writers, need to be a bit humble about story. I personally care a great deal about story. I even think that human beings are genetically hardwired to interpret the world in terms of story. But story is not only what happens. It is also who it happens to and where it happens. And if you have enough scrumptiousness in where it happens and who it happens to, you can sometimes get away with serious flaws in what happens.

After all, if you give us the building blocks of story -- the characters and the world and the predicament -- we can make up our own stories. We imagine ourself in the world, not mimicking the heroine's moves, but performing our own. What would we do if we were Katniss? Etc.

I'm told that part of the attraction for women watching SEX AND THE CITY was imagining oneself in Carrie's shoes but not screwing up relationships with perfectly adorable guys like Aidan.

Hence fan fiction.

That's also why I agree with Richard Rouse III and Jill Murray that story in games does not have to be a linear story. It can be presenting the player with a rich world and rich characters and a predicament, and letting him or her tell his own story through gameplay. (But that is also another post.)

"Because it's Cool."

Jim Henshaw over at The Legion of Decency has a wise post about "The Scene You Don't Write," referring to a particularly shocking scene in the last Game of Thrones but one, involving what went down in a tomb. Also, there was a similar scene he was asked to write years ago, which he refused to write, because it would have destroyed the hero as a character.

(There are not, technically, spoilers in what follow, but clever readers will probably figure stuff out, so if are you are behind in your GoT watching and zealously avoiding social media, read not on.)

I've noticed that certain directors and certain network execs have a very different point of view than I do about what we're putting on screen. I'm all about the story and the characters. I want to tell a story that moves the audience. I've noticed that many directors want most of all to thrill the audience. They want wow factor. They want spectacle. They pay lip service to story and character, but what they really want is cool moments, especially if they can put those cool moments on their reel. How those moments figure into the story is sometimes secondary.

"Why? Because it's cool, that's why."

I'd like to say that these directors' movies don't turn out well, but it's not true, depending on your definition of "turning out." Just about everyone I know thought the STAR WARS prequels were embarrassing, but they made Panamax-sized boatloads of money.

What happens between Cersei and her loving brother is not in the novel. So one wonders what was going through the writers' heads as they wrote the scene. Was it a dictum from HBO? Their mandate is basically, "stuff you can't put on TV":



Well, you certainly can't put the Cersei/Jaimi scene on broadcast TV, now can you. So that is all win. Right?

Of course, it does make Jaimi despicable, which the writers address by having the characters never, ever bring up what happened ever again, sort of like the Supreme Court and Bush v. Gore. That's what makes me suspect that the scene didn't come out of the writing room, but was a network dictum. If the writers had come up with it, they'd have run with it.

Oh, and Jaimi is superdecent to someone in the next episode, maybe by way of apology?

So what do you do when a director or a network wants to have a character do something that is horribly out of character, and will damage the story edifice you have carefully constructed?

This is a problem that every pro writer deals with constantly; because, unless you're writing a spec, you are responsible to whomever hired you. But you are also responsible to the story; and if your credits are a bunch of crap movies, it's unhealthy for your career (though it is healthier than no credits). It is hard being a good servant to two masters. You can attempt to explain why it's a horrible idea. You can threaten to quit (not recommended). You can actually quit (definitely not recommended).

Or you can try to modulate the bad idea in some way, and twist it so that it's not a bad idea.

The two best things you can do are (a) find the good version of their bad idea, so that you are indeed giving them the scene they want, but in a context where it is not a bad idea; or (b) offer them something equally or more spectacular that obviously will not work with the bad idea, so they have to choose one or the other.

If you can do either of these, people will love to work with you, and you won't feel like a hack or a whore.

I generally find that there is a good version of most "bad" ideas. Figuring it out starts with really isolating ad crystallizing what exactly it is that the client wants. They usually want to fix something they perceive as broken. Try to find out what's behind the bad idea, even if it's lonely-puppy syndrome. ("You haven't given me enough toys to play with, so I'm going to chew on the couch.")

If you have to write the bad scene, then write it so that it can be taken out of the script without damaging anything. I.e. don't put any important exposition or plot development in it. Maybe, with luck, it will get taken out in post when your exec or director realizes what he or she has done.

Always, always respond to a bad note on a different day than you get it. In the morning, it may not be such a bad note. That's why the phrase "I'll have a look at that" is your friend.

Of course, there are some situations, like Jim H's, above, where you really have to choose between a rock and a hard place. That's where you get to decide whether you want to be a righteous, proud writer, or a rich one. Up to you. "Pride, plus a sack, is worth a sack," as the Ferengi say. But, as we say in New York, if you can't live with yourself, it's going to be hard to find an apartment.

UPDATE:

If you want to see how the series lines up with the books, here's a handy article and chart.