Posts by J.C. Hutchins

Kath here.   We must bid a fond farewell to WU contributor J.C. Hutchins.  J.C. came to our attention with his viral marketing skills and social media acuity.  These skills have launched a successful publishing career, so successful that he’s become a very busy guy!  We wish him all the best in his endeavors.  Please enjoy his last column for us.  Don’t be a stranger, J.C.!

For my final WU column, I’d like to share perhaps the most important technique I’ve learned so far as a fiction writer. If savvily applied, this approach can add depth and to your story and characters. It will likely conjure deeper questions about your work — stuff that goes beyond nuts-and-bolts necessities such as getting your tale, and its players, from Point A to Point Z. It might make you a smarter storyteller. Your work will certainly benefit from it.

Fiction lives and dies by two things: plot and characters. I’ve read smartly-plotted stories that had pancake-flat characters. I’ve read stories that starred memorable characters, but sported sloppy plots. Hell, I’ve built a moderately-successful career writing stellar examples of both. These days, I’m making a conscious effort to up my game. I want the same for you.

Still-growing writers like us are most-often concerned with the question Why?. Why? fuels plots. Why can’t the hero see the villain for what he really is? Why is the fictional world you’ve created named Gla’Dur’Uk-Uk? Why is a supporting character sticking around in this scene? Why must we mention the gun in Act I?

Why helps us answer pressing questions — most often, the questions we need to answer for our plots to work, and for our characters to appropriately react to those plot points. Why is practical, economical; it provides the gears that make our stories go. I call Why? “desk work” — it’s the stuff you gotta deal with right fricking now. You can’t go wrong with Why?.

But I challenge you to answer a deeper question in your fiction: Why now?

Conflict is the rocket fuel for any good story, but how your characters react to that conflict is what provides direction and resonance for the tale. Of course, how your characters react hinges almost completely on what kind of people they are.

And defining what kind of people they are hinges solely on you, and your ability to intimately know their motivations.

Are you doing everything you can to understand the players in your story? It’s harder than most new writers think. The best characters are complicated, even if the conflicts they’re facing aren’t. They must do and say and think things that are clouded in the very same nigh-arcane thought processes that you and I have. Pieces of their hearts must be cracked or broken — just like ours. They must be more than chess pieces on a game board. They cannot merely react to events; they must contribute to them.

This is hard stuff to write … and yet that’s the brass ring, baby, that’s the stuff that turns potboiler page-turners into bestsellers. Imagine King’s The Stand or Bag of Bones without those novels’ brilliantly-realized characters. Those stories never would have risen above their high concept plot hooks — never would’ve become the miraculous, special Somethings that transcended readers’ expectations. Without such remarkable characters, two of King’s greatest books would have been merely Good.

(A prayer to the Writing Gods: May we all be blessed to write one Good book during our careers. Amen.)

By my reckoning — and hell if I know if it’s true; I’m always growing and learning as a taleteller — the secret to making a Good story a Great one is to know more about your characters than your reader. This sounds insultingly elementary, but recall that we’re tasked with building people solely with our words, people packed with as much infuriating complexity and contradictions as ourselves and our best friends. Even simpletons go deep, man … we have all kinds of gears whirring in our little mind machines, most of which we can’t fathom what makes them go.

Permit me a real world example:

The best writing advice I ever received was from Brad Meltzer, one of my favorite novelists. He writes mostly political thrillers. I met him at a signing, told him I was writing my first novel, and was stuck in Act Two. “I’ve built a lot of momentum,” I said, “and I think I know where this is all eventually going — but how do move forward right now? What do I do?” 

Meltzer replied, “Ask yourself, ‘What happens next?’. 

I blinked, incredulous. He smiled and said, “I know it sounds too simple to work, but it does. Just ask, ‘What happens next?’ 

So I went home and asked myself What happens next? and it totally worked. The simplicity of the question forced me to focus on my immediate goal: getting through the next chapter — and not worrying about what would happen ten chapters from now. 

I still use that technique, and always will.

It’s the time of year when television seasons are concluding, which always gets me thinking about storytelling — endings, specifically. The best dramatic TV season finales perform several critical functions: they pull out the narrative stops by bringing together disparate story threads in interesting and meaningful ways … they often build intrigue or cliffhangers for the season to come … and most important — at least for folks like me, who love plot-driven stories — they dazzle by deftly paying off the narrative buildup experienced so far. 

Great season finales, like the third acts of all great stories, deliver the goods. They do so because they’re obligated to do so; weeks (or in some cases, multiple seasons) of smartly-created narrative have inexorably brought the audience to this flashpoint of suspense, emotional tension and physical action. This is where writers must Deliver The Goods. To present anything less is an unforgivable Writer Crime — a violation of the faith the audience has invested in the narrative so far. 

And yet, at least in some of the series I’ve watched this season, Delivering The Goods wasn’t on the to-do list. I have yet to see the series finale of Lost, though the grapevine suggests its destination may not have been worthy of the six-season journey. The season finale of the narratively-troubled V (which I watch) finally shoved the story into a compelling, action-driven direction — but did so only in the last five minutes of the episode. I’m not even waiting for the season finale of the new Doctor Who; I’ve dropped the series because the storytelling is flabby, and its protagonist fails to inspire childlike wonder within me — a key ingredient for that show’s success, and why it has wowed me in seasons past. 

And then there’s the recent Season Five finale of the horror/thriller show Supernatural — a program I absolutely love. I’m going to deep geek on Supernatural here, and serve up epic-level spoilers about its finale for the rest of this post. My purpose is to illustrate why writers must always Deliver The Goods in their show-stopping finales. If you’re a fan  and haven’t watched the episode, you might want to come back when you have. For everyone else, consider this a What Not To Wear for storytellers. 

I’ve been thinking about movies and television shows lately: the power of their immediacy, the creative constraints screenwriters face in crafting visually rich stories, and most of all, how demanding the craft can be.  While it’s the director’s and actors’ jobs to realize what’s on the page, great screenwriters deliver a vision that illustrates everything — from plot to characterization — in startlingly few words.

In some ways, it’s more poetry than prose. Novelists have 100,000 words to firmly root us in a world, and get us rooting for their protagonists. Screenwriters have startlingly fewer words to tell a compelling tale. Want a crash course in terrific storytelling and killer dialogue? Read a screenplay. Download David Webb Peoples’ screenplay for Unforgiven (PDF), or even a fun actioner like Simon Kinberg’s Mr. and Mrs. Smith (PDF), and you’ll be humbled by the depth on those deceptively-sparse pages.

Writers of all stripes can learn a lot studying screenplays and screenwriters. I’ve found analyzing screenplay dialogue to be particularly illuminating. They say if you can white-out the character names in a screenplay and still know who’s saying what, you’re reading a winner. The character is perfectly represented by what he’s saying; no one else in the story could say those words in that precise way. Great movie dialogue celebrates economical, pitch-perfect characterization.

Screenplays and teleplays are, of course, stories … and the best characteristics of brilliant tale-telling are found in flicks, shows, comic books and novels. But it sometimes takes studying a different medium — and listening to what masters of that medium have to say — for the scales of familiarity to fall from a writer’s eyes and behold narrative truths in new ways. This reminds us of what’s important in our craft, and can school us on our personal writing weaknesses. 

Such a revelation happened to me today, as I read a letter David Mamet issued to the writing team of The Unit, an action-drama inspired by the real-life U.S. military special forces. Mamet, a masterful playwright and screenwriter, was the show’s executive producer. (The show was cancelled last year.) 

There’s no context provided for what prompted Mamet’s 2005 letter — which you can read in full here — other than what’s implied in its opening paragraphs. It seems the network was bombarding The Unit’s writers with requests to cram their scripts with more exposition about setting, characters and story. The writing staff probably responded by dutifully adding these bits. This is, as Mamet says in the letter, the antithesis of drama.

This, he says, is a crock of shit. And he’s right.

Since Writer Unboxed is focusing on voice this month, I thought I’d add an unconventional riff to the awesome contributions already put forth.

I love reading prose fiction — but in my heart of hearts, I’m a movie junkie. It’s a brilliant way to economically tell stories, and I enjoy the creative constraints the medium has: running time, MPAA ratings, budget. The mission? To cram as much narrative — both spoken and unspoken — into the frame as possible.

Notice that I said “unspoken.” That’s key. I believe prose fiction writers can easily learn about voice by watching and studying movies — especially when they pay attention to those unspoken bits.

Writing great books and short stories hinges greatly on your authorial voice — but always remember that your voice requires tonal flexibility. This can be defined by a character’s point of view, the pacing of a scene, or what’s happening in that scene. Thoughtful characters and slower-paced scenes can permit a more lyrical authorial voice; peppy characters and action sequences often demand something else.

Now I can’t tell you how to craft your voice; like Barbara, I believe your personal world view defines most of that. I also believe that the best authorial voices don’t attract attention to themselves. But if you’re looking for ways to appropriately use your voice for characters and scenes, I suggest popping in a DVD, muting the volume, and watching what unfolds.

Don’t watch the actors. Try to ignore the blitz-cut editing. Forget trying to decipher what’s being said. Instead, look for what’s happening in the frame overall — mostly the use of colors, color saturation and lighting. In the hands of filmmaking masters, these techniques represent the invisible art of cinema: the ability to wordlessly evoke emotion. To me, they represent the “voice” of the overall film, or a particular scene.

I think there’s wisdom there … and if you look for patterns, you’ll find them. For instance, most films these days depict workplace interiors — no matter how much sunshine is streaming through the locale’s windows — as cold, emotionless, antiseptic places. Filmmakers achieve this by clever lighting, or by processing the film (or digital footage) in such a way to suck the color from the moving images. The result is often a gray- or blue-tinged scene, with its characters looking as happy as a herd of zombies.