Quantum Storytelling

Or is that speed up? Everyone seems busy, the blogosphere has gotten pretty quiet. I didn’t think I was one of the quiet ones, but it turns out it’s looking that way ever since I got an XBOX 360! I’ve been playing a lot of Viva Piñata, and Gears of War.

Of course the wife has been playing Hexic and I got her Bejeweled 2 on XBOX Live Arcade. She’s also got her own Piñata garden.

Last night we tried out the Sonic demo, which was alright — Sonic runs so fast at times we ran him right off a cliff. We also tried out the LEGO Star Wars II demo, which was an insane amount of fun. The wife’s been bugging me about what to get me for Xmas, and I figure that might be a good one.

In more writing related news, I tried out a nifty new note-taking and To Do web app with integrated calendar called Stikkit. Made myself a story To Do list and set the due date for December 31st. This’ll give me motivation to do more than play the 360 over the Christmas break. It’s a pretty nifty free web app, check it out!

P.S. My 360 gamertag is Redchurch77 if any of you are playing.

I’ve been having a bit of trouble lately unpacking my story, and I thought maybe for some of you this would sound familiar and some of you might have some tips or tricks to share.

I’ve broken my story down into sequences, and broken it further into scenes. My problem is I often end up with something like a shotgun blast; A scene here, a scene there, peppered across the bird’s eye view of my story. The problem is not just connecting the dots between key scenes, but creating new ones that fill and flesh out the story and create greater depth between your big moments.

A good example is when you write out your story as a logline or a 3 page treatment, you have a lot of indirect narrative. For example, “The hero goes on a trip to city A, and meets with Jerry. When he arrives back, he gets in a fight with his wife.”

Now, this treatement of indirect narrative may be perfect from the standpoint of getting the higher level story structure laid out. But using our example let’s say that the hero’s meeting with Jerry, and his fight with his wife upon return are two major events of the story that take place a month apart. Let’s also say that you don’t intend for that month to be glossed over… you intend to create more scenes to fill the space between those two key points.

What happens in between? It’s not just indirect narrative of “Hero returns, fight begins.” Maybe there are things the hero experiences or discovers on that month away, and some of those things lead to increased tension which culminate with a fight with the spouse on return.

Again, this is just an example, but it illustrates that two plot points may be very close together on the logline or plot line, but in terms of scenes they are meant to be further apart, buffered and padded by other scenes that you haven’t yet created.

Unpacking scenes from your higher level sequences or plotline can be tricky. What methods do you use to better unpack your story? How do you deal with the problem of filling the gap between two pivotal scenes? How do you extrude, unpack, extrapolate one scene into five, or create that breathing space between the major plot points or significant moments of the story?

Having recently finished The Ax by Donald Westlake, and Hit Man by Lawrence Block I’ve been thinking a lot about anti-heroes. It’s interesting to me that such amoral characters as murderers can make strong protagonists.

Marv, and many of the other protagonists of the Sin City graphic novels (and movie) would definitely qualify. Of course all of this goes back to the hard drinking, hard boiled detective. A few others worth mention: Gully Foyle from Alfred Bester’s Stars My Destination, Clint Eastwood’s William Munny in Unforgiven. I could go on…

Who are some of your favorite anti-heroes?