Mind Your Business

It's about time an agent wrote a screenwriting book. In her book MIND YOUR BUSINESS, veteran lit agent Michele Wallerstein gives you a perspective another writer won't. What is an agent looking for in a script? How do you score in a meeting? How do you handle your side of a negotiation? How can you tell when your agent isn't into you any more?

Many good writers put all their efforts into their scripts. But a brilliant writer can screw up his own career by what he does or doesn't do. Minding your business -- and agenting your agent -- is almost as important as your screenwriting craft.

When I was starting out, Ms. Wallerstein was one of the agents people recommended I contact. She really knows her stuff. Her book is a tad slim, with a lot of sample contracts, but it's worth a read. Check it out.

Flaws

Oh, and, here's another thing I'd like to see in RPG's: flaws.

In Role Playing Games, you get to portion out your character's various virtues. Strength, dex, intelligence, etc. All the stuff you used to allocate your character in paper-and-dice D&D.

White Wolf's RP game systems also asked you to choose character flaws. In VAMPIRE: THE MASQUERADE, you might have been sired while still wounded, so every morning you have to use blood to heal yourself. Or you could be crazy. Or haunted by a memory. The point was you were role playing a character, not just trying to max out stats.

Flaws make the man.

It would be interesting to put flaws into a console RPG. Make the player choose a flaw for his character. For example, your character panics. Faced with combat he might run away. Or run into combat prematurely.

Or, your character literally can't walk past an opportunity to gamble. You'd have to keep him away from gambling houses or he would find himself in a game until he lost his money. If he's within 50 feet of a poker game, he is drawn to it and can't do anything else until he's run out of money, or taken all the money. So he would have to avoid places that have poker games. (And there would of course be a mission in a gambling house.)

A character might have a phobia. He can take on monsters, but runs from animals. Or refuses to hurt animals no matter how dangerous or violent they are. Or goes into a berserk rage whenever he runs across a certain monster class.

Would that be fun to play? I would find it interesting -- it would put me more in the character.

I used to LARP. I wrote a one-night LARP called Camlann Eve where every player had a taboo, and if they broke it, there were serious consequences. And quite a few of them broke their taboos. (Hint: if you are forbidden to drink blueberry juice, check what the DM pours into your glass at the feast?)

On the other hand, players might just find it annoying, I guess, if they're trying to "beat the game" rather than enjoy it.

I guess you could offer it as an option -- either you must take a flaw if you're playing in hardcore mode; or, if you take a flaw, you get a few extra points in stats.

Would you be interested in a game that made your role-play your character more?

Can't See the Forest for the Dialog Trees

Hunter urged me to check out DRAGON AGE: ORIGINS, but it didn't grab me. The combat system seemed a little passive. It was weird that other characters' voices are recorded, but your character doesn't have a voice. The enemy AIs are pretty dumb. (Why don't the walking corpses go after the mage instead of the warriors?) Characters move awkwardly. NPCs are pretty generic with stilted, insipid things to say. The sound design is ... okay, I don't think there is a sound design. There are some sounds here and there, but overall it's a bare soundtrack.

A little bored, I started selecting only the most obnoxious dialog options. (E.g. "Go soak your head.") But that never produced any interesting results. The other character would respond accordingly, but there were never any consequences past the next line of dialogue. What's the point?

Some game studios are putting a lot of work into dialog trees these days. At least, for some games they're recording all sorts of different dialog options. There are big fat scripts and my actor friends spend days in the studio. But the dialog rarely seems to have any effect on the story. It's just there for ambience.

It would be possible to rig up a basic "conversational combat" system where you can only achieve your goal using the right dialog options and not others, just as you need to use fire against undead but not against, say, balrogs. It would take a bit of programming. But all that hard work recording all those voices would actually have some gameplay and story value.

Or, you can just skip dialog trees altogether. I know some script writers hate dialogue trees and just don't put them in. I don't miss not having any dialog options in RED DEAD REDEMPTION or ASSASSIN'S CREED. But when properly used, as in, say, HEAVY RAIN, a real branching dialog tree can really "put you in the movie."

UPDATE:  Thanks to David for linking to this escapist post. And this comment on it:

I'm glad to read this. The conversation minigame is something I'd like to see more of - either inspired by LSL Magna Cum Laude (minus the sperm as you mention), or to pick an in my opinion better example, Fahrenheit ("Indigo Prophecy" in the censored version). You have to juggle the right stick to get a specific dialogue option, and time to choose is limited. The "best" topics (i.e. the ones that are the most intelligent) are hardest to do. Other options are easier, and if time runs out, the easiest one is automatically chosen.
Thus you can easily coast through a conversation, or choose to make it go a specific way by "using your mind".
Another good example of conversation done right is in Culpa Innata. There is no minigame, but the number of topics to be picked is limited by time of day, a set (but hidden) predefined conversation length, and any topic chosen hides and opens other topics.
All of these are much better than the Talking Heads mechanic just about all other games use.

A Very Bad Game, A Good Conversation

Rock, Paper, Shotgun posts about a very bad game called Hey, Baby. In the game you are a woman walking on the street, and guys come up to you and say complimentary things like, "Hey, baby, I like the way you walk." And you kill them and they get a tombstone with whatever phrase they pissed you off with.

Prompting Leigh Alexander among others, to write about what it's like to be a woman walking around and having utter strangers accost her. With compliments, technically, but with invasive, violating compliments she's not allowed to respond to with the mayhem she feels.

Videogames are starting to become a handy medium for social commentary. Films and TV shows have long been places for a bit of social commentary, Sam Goldwyn's dictum notwithstanding. (He said, "If you want to send a message, call Western Union.") Now it's easy enough to write a little game just to explain how you feel about something that irks you. People may not play it for very long if it sucks, but they might download it and play it long enough to talk about it.

There's also yards of social commentary in triple-A games, from the Ayn-Rand-gone-berserk satire of the BIOSHOCK games to the political rhetoric of the various warlords in FALLOUT 3. But this game  was created expressly for the purposes of making a point, and I find that sort of cool.

E Shoots, D Scores!

I've been working for the past few days with a very fine composer named Darren Fung, who scored my 2007 short, 12 WAYS TO SAY I'M SORRY, and has now been kind enough to score my new short, YOU ARE SO UNDEAD.

It's sort of terrifying to work on the score. A great score can raise your movie to a whole 'nother level. The wrong score can ruin it -- even if it's lovely music, if the emotions of the score and the emotions onscreen don't complement each other, the film is kaput.

It's a truism that films are made multiple times. The writer makes the film in his head. The director puts it on screen. The editor remakes it. The composer makes it all over again. "I can make people cry," Stephen Spielberg says, "but John Williams can make them weep."

I find that with so many creative collaborations, having enough time for a back and forth is crucial. I didn't like Darren's first cue, and asked him to write something else. Weirdly, the second cue made me like the first cue better, maybe because it managed to get me away from my fixation on the temp music. Then Darren changed the orchestral strings arrangement to a smokey Miles Davis trumpet thing, and the whole thing felt right.

It isn't what I asked for. I think it's better -- it does the same thing as what I wanted, but in a fresher and cooler way. I'm sure I couldn't have asked for the cue I got right off the bat; we had to struggle back and forth to arrive at it. I had to struggle for the right words, and to figure out what I didn't like about the earlier cues; Darren had to struggle to figure out what the hell I was looking for.

Well, thanks, Darren, for the terrific score, and for bearing with me...

Show, Don't Tell, or, The Zoo

One of my procrastination sites is Ask Metafilter. Today someone was asking another question about dating. I haven't had to date in a very long time, thank God, but it occurred to me that "show, don't tell" applies to online dating too.

A long time ago, I tried online dating. You'd email back and forth a bit, then meet up. The emailing back and forth tended to be about who you are and how you got that way. Then you'd meet in person and tell more of your life story over drinks. Soon you'd run out of life story. Awkward.

When you meet someone "in real life," you don't tell your story. You show who you are by what you do and how you do it. And if someone is interested in you, she finds out in bits and pieces about your backstory as you go along actually doing things. That's more like a good movie, which is 95% about what your hero is doing, and only 5% about how the hero got to be that way.

So my advice, if you are dating, is not to tell your story. Instead, go to the zoo. Talk about the animals. (Or go on a hike, or go to a used bookstore, or go to yard sales, or whatever.) Be fun. Show who you are, don't tell who you are. That will pull your audience of one into your story more than any amount of telling will.

Corpsing

What Is a Showrunner?

The Writers Guild of Canada has posted The Showrunner Code, a nifty pamphlet outlining what a showrunner is and does, and why. Worth a look, whether you're in Canada or elsewhere.