Thank you; the io9 website is always completely broken for me for some reason -- any time someone links to it, all I get is their logo (or sometimes only part of it...) and a broken purple or white page with no text. I've tried turning off all my extensions (adblock, flashblock, etc) but it is still totally broken. This is with the latest Firefox on Windows, in case anyone at their site reads this and cares to try to fix it.
>#19: Coincidences to get characters into trouble are great; coincidences to get them out of it are cheating.
With a little bit of retrospection, this seems to be one of the most powerful factors separating the films I've liked from those I haven't.
It's interesting to see how storytelling is like modelling - build a hypothetical universe with hypothetical characters and see what plot(s) emerge(s). If it's unsatisfactory, don't change the plot directly, but instead manipulate the characters until the black box spits out something interesting.
Reflecting on my recent viewing of Snow White and the Huntsman, it makes sense why Charlize Theron's character managed to get so much more developed than the others' - the character-centric story development process naturally produces a wide distribution of character depths.
Related is screenwriter Terry Rossio's concept of "Impressive Failure". Essentially the idea is that characters are defined by the quality of their failures.
Actors playing god were lowered onto stages to conclude plays back in ancient greece, this was called deus ex machina. Then some guy decided this was lame and cheap so he wrote the definitive book called Art of Poetry to say this.
Point is, don't use gods to explain away your problems.
Tips like yours makes me wish I had studied a lot more of the classics, drama, etc.
One "trick" that drives me bugga is the plot device.
Like all kids of an age, my son devoured the Harry Potter books. Trying to be a good dad, shared interests, and all that, I tried to read those books. As far as I got, Rowling would write the protagonists into wedge and then throw in some awesome new power to get them out. Like a bad Star Trek TNG episode or pretty much all of Dragon Ball Z (which was still fun to watch with my kid). Haha. Never thought of Harry Potter as manga before.
Anyhoo.
Compared to Neil Gaiman's efforts. Especially his children's books. They're perfectly formed spheres, without flaw. His stories are internally consistent and conflict resolution happens in a (suspended belief) believable way.
The essence of trial-and-error, rather than going directly the outcome you want.
It's interesting that even Bret Victor's Inventing on Principle only accelerates trial-and-error, but doesn't eliminate it. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PUv66718DII&t=14m0s For that, you need a declarative understanding, and an analytic relation from outcomes to initial conditions
A coincidence is just something which happened without a lead-on. An outcome surprising, therefore perceived as improbable (perception bias at play here).
Anything that happens in time has an outcome and things that follow it in logical order. However, we think differently if we flip the time axis, and look at the sequence of events leading onto a final event, rather than if we look at the sequence of events started by a seminal event.
The simple way to overcome this?
Put your coincidence in. Then, start going back in time, dropping smaller and smaller clues and building premise for the "coincidence" to happen. Finally, it's not a coincidence any more.
The difference between "coincidence" and "culmination" is fairly menial work. I am surprised more authors don't do this, and sometimes wonder if they don't include a build-up just to be intentionally cheesy.
If you want to have fun experimenting with the reversal of time in logical reasoning, please try a game I have invented, called Neutrino. You can find a description at http://cheater.posterous.com/neutrino (let me know if there are any problems). I have come up with it autumn last year and wrote a blog post about it, but forgot to upload it (or maybe there was some more work to do that I forgot about completely...) - you get an upvote for several reasons, one of them is that you reminded me that I should put it up! Thanks!
Your back-building of coincidence is essentially Chekov's gun, viewed from another angle. A potential downside is that if it isn't very artfully placed, the reader will see the significance before the characters, and grow frustrated at their idiocy.
Thanks for the comment. Yeah, you're right, it's just something you can come up with researching tv tropes. Basically it's like the story teller's technical manual, and again, being annoyed at stupid characters will be something you fix by reading tv tropes.
In some fringe cases you want the reader to "get the idea" before the characters do.
One reason is to annoy them and create stress, which is often used in thrillers, where you can see exactly the character's going to die.. or are they? Yep, thrilling.
Another one is to give the reader a feeling of "superiority", in the meaning of seeing a grander scheme of things. By making this level of reasoning fairly predictable you can use this as fundament and build more complicated meaning on top of it.
> With a little bit of retrospection, this seems to be one of the most powerful factors separating the films I've liked from those I haven't.
In light of what I said above, it's not surprising the top commenter didn't like movies where menial work has not been performed. It's basic housekeeping. If that is missing, I can easily see a lot of other stuff missing too. Impossible coincidences are a symptom of illness, there are many other symptoms too.
#12: Discount the 1st thing that comes to mind. And the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th – get the obvious out of the way. Surprise yourself.
"I don't think it's good that Apple is perceived as different. I think it's important that Apple is perceived as much better. If being different is essential for that, then we should be different, but if we could be much better without being different that would be fine with me."
Yeah, definitely. It applies to making songs as well. It probably applies to any creative, competitive endeavor in which a stranger consumes the end result.
"#9: When you're stuck, make a list of what WOULDN'T happen next. Lots of times the material to get you unstuck will show up."
I use a similar technique when brainstorming, after all the obvious good ideas are exhausted. Think of the worst possible way to solve a problem, and then look nearby for reasonable solutions.
I'm about thirty pages into the Dramatica PDF and am finding it very interesting in how it specifically codifies some things I've observed about stories while working on my comics. This promises to be an interesting read, thanks!
#1: You admire a character for trying to be funny more than for actually being interesting.
#2: You gotta keep in mind what’s interesting to you as an audience, not what got you an actual audience. They can be v. different.
#3: Trying for theme is important, but you won’t see what the story is actually about til you’re at the end of it. Now rewrite it so Greedo shoots first.
"11: Putting it on paper lets you start fixing it. If it stays in your head, a perfect idea, you'll never share it with anyone."
This is the theme of my project. Especially the past 2 years. Except I do put it on paper, but actually building the thing always takes a second hand because I keep waiting for the "perfect" solution. I've finally gave up on that idea, because
1) i don't have the resources to build the perfect idea
2) it takes too long to wait for something to happen in your head
I've recently adopt a motto "hackFast". This means to know what you want to get done and just do it. And not just lazily open up your IDE and selective fix or create things. I mean, to open the IDE and just dominate the code.
There's a balance that I haven't achieved yet. There are times when you do need to think of the perfect solution, but until then get the prototype done. You're mind will wrap around the logic and it will eventually fix itself.
#11 and #17 goes hand and hand. It all go down to doing it.
..I've also been recently reading "Getting Things Done".
I've had the pleasure of hearing various people from Pixar speak. What impresses me most is the attitude of humility and the love of learning the craft the seem to have. I'm pretty amazed they have managed to maintain that after so many hit movies, the temptation to sit back and feel like you've cracked the enigma of storytelling and have it all figured out must be huge.
There seems to be a pretty common message for many of the rules here that encourage trial-and-error and re-doing things. I think that is just brilliant advice for innovation in general not just story writing. Not being afraid to fail and trying things again and again truly leads to amazing results.
> Coincidences to get characters into trouble are great; coincidences to get them out of it are cheating.
Ugh. Please, no. I have no training as a fiction writer but as an audience member I hate this. Nothing is more annoying than tension that comes from a totally implausible sequence of events.
Coincidence and implausibility are not necessarily the same thing. Good writing requires you to still make it BELIEVABLE but that doesn't mean it can't have an element of "Talk about bad luck"
Agreed. Coincidences do have an effect and are worth exploring when writing about the human condition, regardless of the outcome. I get the feeling the author was trying to offer a simple example of deus ex machina, which can be enjoyable, but is cheating, nonetheless.
It's not that bad - coincidences get people into trouble all the time. The problem in resolving a story with a coincidence is that it robs the main characters of their struggle. It happens in real life, but it's not compelling fiction.
"I lost my job due to things beyond my control, and subsequently lost my house, but three months later I won the lottery. The end." is a great real life story, but it sucks as fiction.
Substitute the word "character" with "product" and all these rules seem to have remarkable likeness to designing a successful product/building a successful startup
Thanks for posting this. This now gives me the framework to start creating a plot around some ideas I've had floating around and evolving for quite some time.
I, for one, find Pixar's storytelling extremely naive, paint-by-numbers kind of affair.
Like past Disney without the genius (e.g Fantasia, the dark forest scene in Snow White, etc) but with more puns thrown in. Or maybe "animated ho-hum Spielberg" is more apt.
Could be OK to take your kid to, but IMHO even kids (or especially kids) deserve better.
And not to be accused that I speak without offering an alternative, I think that something like "A nightmare before Christmas" is light years ahead of Pixar's work, in storytelling, artistic vision, and even visually (and I'm not saying that because of its "dark mood". Light stories could also be told in a more artistic way than Pixar's).
While I will grant that Tim Burton can be clever I have never seen anything of his that carries the same emotional weight of Pixar's best works. Toy Story 3 was an amazing success and pulled off being a very emotional film while being a comedy/adventure. I know many people who cried or nearly cried toward the end who are parents with kids leaving their childhood behind. The first several minutes of UP are amazingly melancholy. The "dance" in space from Wall-E is downright beautiful and Wall-E's devotion to the girl robot when she is broken is rather heartwarming.
Incidentally according to BoxOffice Mojo Wall-E made 521 Million dollars.
> The "dance" in space from Wall-E is downright beautiful
IMO Wall-E is more of a work of pure art than a flick, for the first half or so (before the mad rush towards the climax at the end). The wonderful detail both in the derelict environment Wall-E trundles through at the begging and the genuine sense of awe once the story hits space are head and shoulders over most similar efforts.
You compare to some of the absolute masterpieces of animation, which might never be surpassed. But Pixars movies are still among the very best in the genre. Its like saying The Godfather is mediocre because it is not Citizen Kane.
Truly. My enjoyment of Monsters, Inc. takes nothing away from my awe of Akira.
Different movies, songs, activities for different moods, wants, desires.
It's been a tough year. So the partner and I have been watching a lot of romantic comedies. As a caveman, I'm surprised by how much I've been enjoying them.
Your point of view is kind of surprising. I couldn't stop watching Wall-E for example even for the 10th time, because I found it so unique and compelling.
Even if it was painted by numbers, there were lots of numbers and not just integers.
Not to say the plot was not predictable, if that is your primary issue.
"I, for one, find Pixar's storytelling extremely naive, paint-by-numbers kind of affair."
In the end it's about creating something that sells and makes money. If it has other benefits that's icing on the cake. (Although as you know many people prefer the icing to the cake...)
I think they have highs and lows. Wall-E was pretty much everything I would want in a big budget movie, but it wasn't a megahit. Then I see the previews for Brave, which looks dreadfully bad, and I can't help but think the company is changing.
It's not much of a critique to say that one thing is bad and another one is better. Batista didn't really give any explanation for why he thinks Pixar films are bad, which when you're talking about some of the world's highest approval-rating films, tends to be a bit content-free.
A detailed critique would be interesting; simply to say they're "naive" is... I dunno, naïve.
I think you're just searching for a reason to dislike Pixar films for the sake of disliking them. That's why you don't seem to be able to articulate your reasons very well. Have you heard of Armand White? He's a reviewer who always gives negative reviews to anything popular on rottentomatoes, so he can get more pageviews by having the one rotten review in a field of fresh ones. You and he would probably get on well.
I, for one, find Pixar's storytelling extremely naive, paint-by-numbers kind of affair.
Our human brains are puny and weird, and programmed to only enjoy one kind of story. Or rather, it's pretty weird that we enjoy any kind of story at all; why would we want to waste our time hearing about made-up stuff that never happened? But we do enjoy it... though only for a fairly narrow range of stories with a fairly narrow range of structures.
So not liking Pixar means I'm like this "Armand White" guy that doesn't like anything? Did you even notice that I gave TWO examples of things I consider better (old Disney, Nightmare before Xmas)?
The rest of your argument I find no much logic in it: "Our human brains are puny and weird, and programmed to only enjoy one kind of story. Or rather, it's pretty weird that we enjoy any kind of story at all; why would we want to waste our time hearing about made-up stuff that never happened? But we do enjoy it... though only for a fairly narrow range of stories with a fairly narrow range of structures"
WHere did you got that impression from? We like a great variety of storytelling modes and stories. Only the more naive like just bland, cookie cutter repetitions of the same narrow range of stories and structures (action blockbuster crap, the nth romantic comedy, etc).
In film, for example, we dont just have heroic/feel good/suggary Spielberg movies (the real movie Pixar equivalent if there ever was one). We have people from Scotchese and Copolla to Fincher and Riddley Scott, to Burton and Woody Allen, to Tarantino and Waters and Jarmoush...
"Two better examples"? If I said I liked BMWs and Jaguars more than I liked Aston Martins, would that be enough for you? Or would you like me to epand a little on why I said that?
Besides, the story in Nightmare before Christmas is pretty bland - you don't watch it a subsequent time to get wrapped up in the story. Its winning components are the musical numbers and the creative setting. As a whole, it's very good, but the rewatchability of the story component is fairly poor.
You are critizing Pixar films for having something in common? In animation we have different styles, Akira, Wall-E, Cindarella, Mononoke, Belleville, Grave of the Fireflies all very different, from different studios and directors. All Pixar productions have a certain common feel and common themes, just like eg. all Tarantino films.
I have been struggling to produce some form of artistic, or even creative output almost all my life, in different media and contexts, and I have had to learn #14 on my own. Trying hard, and I have thought about this on many occasions, I could not come up with a more essential and fundamental prerequisite to making art. There is so much "art" out there that simply does not have a story to tell. There are so many struggling artists that do not have a story to tell, and they keep wondering why they don't achieve success of any measure. I'm not going to say that realizing this made me insanely successful overnight, but it has given me a direction and hope of ever actually reaching the point at which I can be satisfied with something I have created.
However, I think that it is more important than just as a way to make good art. The quote originally reads:
"Why must you tell THIS story? What's the belief burning within you that your story feeds off of? That's the heart of it."
I would say that this generalizes to:
What is the value of what you're doing?
This is crucial. A lot of people do things without value, or do not focus on the value and let themselves become sidetracked by the whole ritual of their form. What I mean by "the ritual of their form" is the often sizeable set of gimmicks you feel forced to tack onto whatever you are making. For example, every website now "needs" Oauth and social network support and other junk, which is not crucial, but it's something everyone feels they need to have. This sort of ritualistic dance happens in every form of output, be it when they create a computer program, a business (we need to be agile! be green! support the community!), a new philosophy, a new movie, a new bicycle, a new mathematics theorem, a new noodle recipe.
The generalized form does lose its potency, though. Applied literally to music, you'd ask:
What is the value of the music you are creating?
I think asking What is the story your music tells? is much more accurate. I guess I am trying to say that the word value can be interpreted in different ways, and many of them are not going to get you very far from what you are doing already. For example, when thinking of technology, value is application. So I'd ask: What sort of application can this technology bear?
If I were going to add anything to Pixar's list, it would be this:
!!!! KEEP A SCRAPBOOK, ASSOCIATE ENTRIES TO THE VALUES (EMOTIONS, THEMES, APPLICATIONS) THEY EVOKE !!!!
Yup, all caps, so that you don't scroll past. This was the single thing that boosted my productivity most in the last several years, and it out-classes everything else by very, very far.
I currently have two folders under $HOME/Documents, called "creative" and "topics". I first started "topics" where I'd save pages visited, notes, documents, and so on in a directory tree, so for example I have topics/computers/haskell/refactoring/. and topics/electronics/tubes/. and topics/health/bodybuilding/training-plan/. and so on. Later I started noticing that I also visit a lot of creative stuff that I want to keep a track on, which I cannot sort into this rigid system I built under "topics" because it evoked emotions, rather than ideas of practical applications. I guess that this is my Starship & the Canoe (and if you haven't read the book, at least read a summary). The "creative" system came into place a bit after I started trawling Youtube for music I like, and decided to sort it according to emotion. I now have 59 private playlists, with entries like "feeling of optimism and inner peace", "peril / 70s car chase", "hanging at the peak", "hyped", and "pleasant summer sun", many of those have more than 20 entries. Some of the names won't make much of a sense to anyone but me. My "creative" directory contains entries like "beauty", "inspirational", "introversion", "poverty", "trippy", and so on.
If there was only one thing they were to teach me during primary and high school, I wish it was how to do this. Sadly, they didn't. As many people, I can't really pinpoint one skill I use every day that school has taught me.
Why worry about value? I make art mostly because I enjoy the process, and don't usually care about the result at all. It's much easier to handle that way, and I pretty much never get block. If I feel tired of what I'm doing, I just resort to doing exercises or copying and analyzing other people's work. I think the point "why must you tell this story" is not about whether you should make art, write that story, draw that picture, but for you to research your inner reason to make this piece. Obviously you tell the story because you want to, this question just helps you make the intention clearer, so that you can structure your work around it in order to bring that essence out. In photography/painting, you would pick a main subject, which can be anything you find interesting, images you see or images you imagine or just abstract work, and then build the image around the reason you find that image interesting. Not about whether the image or the work of art has any inherent value, of course it has because you are making it.
> Why worry about value? I make art mostly because I enjoy the process
<black turtleneck> Because if you do something to enjoy yourself it isn't art, it's onanism </black turtleneck>
> research your inner reason to make this piece
exactly. Some people never do that, and once you look behind the scenes and try to answer this question it turns out there's no inner reason and it's just paint by numbers. I think we're just talking about the same thing in different terms: your inner reason is the value that I talk about.
> Obviously you tell the story because you want to
I very much abstracted from stories in my comment above - the question I said is necessary to ask yourself is:
* "what story does your music tell?"
* "what story does your painting tell?"
* "what story does your business tell?"
You're right, asking what story does your story tell is a bit senseless. But back to value: really, what sort of person goes to people, and tells them stories with no value what so ever? If I knew that guy and he kept coming back I'd punch him in the face. I am assuming you tell people your stories because you are encouraged, because they find them cool. Here, "cool" is also of value. With time you'll notice more important things in life that can be achieved with storytelling, be it moral support, politics, philosophy. Those are values just like your "cool", but often end up working at a deeper level. Because what's "cool", really? Your cool skateboarder character might end up being "cool" because they're a defiant character who doesn't give up. He might be "cool" for other reasons that meld together seamlessly to just display "cool", but if you analyse it further you can break it down to very deep, fundamental values being displayed, and balanced against his shortcomings.
> In photography/painting, you would pick a main subject, which can be anything you find interesting, images you see or images you imagine or just abstract work
That's waiting for your work to do itself. It takes ages to come up with something good this way. That's like randomly bashing on the piano and trying to come up with a cool melody. And you know what, I did that when I was starting with piano, and I did that quite a lot, and it taught me some things. But it's not the smart way to go. Photography, painting, and music are figurative forms. This means they convey deeper meaning by use of trite objects in intricate compositions or settings. The right way to go is to find an abstract subject or meaning you want to go, and come up with a subject that will convey some or most of it, and then make it work. This makes the difference between a guy with a flickr stream and a photographer who goes out, takes one photo, and it's a hit. If you want to take ten thousand photos and only find one thing which meaning can be assigned to, that's one approach, and lots of people do it. But it's an amazing loss of time because trying to reverse-engineer meaning into one of a thousand pictures is difficult and time-consuming. Better to make the picture work for your purpose, not your purpose work for the picture.
> and then build the image around the reason you find that image interesting.
Exactly. That's the thing. You have to find an image that is interesting. You forgot to mention, but you also have to find an image that other people will find interesting, otherwise you're again just shaking your dick. Art is communication with other people, it doesn't work solo. If you come up with an idea that lots of people share, you can convey it by means of a picture. You can't say "oh, a lot of people share this picture with me" but you can say "I bet a lot of people share this value or feeling or interest with me". That's why it's easier to connect with your consumers if you first think about the meaning of your output, tune it to what they will like, and only then follow this up with form that conveys the meaning. If you first come up with form, and then try to stick meaning onto it, it just doesn't work.
Another issue with retrofitting meaning onto form is that you often come up with fairly stretched analogies, and those end up working for less and less people. If you retrofit meaning onto form, the form will be ambiguous, because there will be angles from which you hadn't viewed your art, and it's difficult to cover all possible analyses of your form and make sure they all end up conveying your retrofitted meaning. If you come up with meaning first, and create a form while keeping the meaning in your head at all times, then in every second of the form's creation you shape it towards conveying the meaning. This has much better, more coherent results.
> Not about whether the image or the work of art has any inherent value, of course it has because you are making it
Is that really so? Nowadays you can easily say 99% of all photography is throwaway. When it started out, it was pretty much art, no matter whether high art or kitsch. Would you say every photograph out there has some inherent value and meaning? Bear in mind that this isn't up to the person who made the photograph, it's up to the people who look at it, and evaluate it. Value is in the eye of the beholder, and if you can't make the beholder see the value, then you fail as an artist.
Thanks for the comment, it was very thought-provoking.
I still stand by my point of view. You have to enjoy the process first, and if you plan to show your work to other people, or publish it, then you go into the curation and editing process. No photographer goes out, takes one picture, and it's a hit. No author writes a book and it's a worthy book from the first draft. Often the meaning of the work shows itself while you're creating it. Or you will find a theme, a meaning while doing random shiznit. And really the most important part for me is to enjoy it, else why would I do it? That way I keep my productivity up, and if after discarding 99% people like the remaining 1%, good for them.
My system for being creative is slightly easier to follow:
1. Do cool things
2. Show them to people
And that's pretty much it.
However, I do keep a notebook in my pocket at all times to jot down interesting ideas, not so much because I'd ever look at it again, but because it makes me think about it a little bit longer.
My value evaluation system is similarly silly - if I still remember the idea a week from now, two weeks from now ... whatever. If I have an idea consistently for a long period of time, then there's probably something there. The next step is to make it and see if anyone else thinks there's something there.
Or at least to tell people and ask them if they think there's something there.
> if I still remember the idea a week from now, two weeks from now ... whatever. If I have an idea consistently for a long period of time, then there's probably something there.
Hmm, I think you're losing out a lot by not making an honest effort to work on your ideas.
Something insignificant today could be important ten years from now, that's why photographers often have such huuuuuge collections of photos.
I'd also venture a guess that sometimes your work is repetitive. If you start recording what you did when then you can notice this and 1. stop repeating yourself 2. start re-using the work that really does need to be repeated
But the biggest reason to keep a scrapbook is that quite often the best ideas work like this for me: I have an idea today, two months down the line I get something in my mind and I try to compare it to things already in my scrapbook; turns out it's that idea from two months ago. Then, a year or so down the line I'll revisit it, and come up with a tiny detail that makes the thing complete and ten times better. Ideas are like puzzles, and sometimes you get a new piece every ten years. By not keeping a scrapbook I deprived myself of the ability to solve the puzzles of my life. It was like some Kafkan nightmare where I ran around in circles with no apparent purpose and nothing to show for all my effort.
io9 hasn't added much else to the original list.