Writing Advice – Craft & Process

Collecting the posts I’ve written about the craft and process of writing

Writing as a great and terrible steampunk juggernaut

PETERMBALL Writing Advice - Craft & Process

There are weeks when my writing process feels like a great and terrible steampunk juggernaut, powered by a creaky engine and beholden to its own momentum. When everything is running correctly, I get an extraordinary amount of work done and quickly stack up pages.

When things go wrong, momentum will carry me for a while even though the engine is blowing pistons and and leaking fluids. Then the momentum will falter and the fires of the engine will go dark, and the act of getting the whole thing moving once more feels impossible.

Sometimes, the thing that goes wrong is needing to turn and head in a new direction. Or stop for a while, to focus on something else, then restart after a short break. Sometimes the thing that goes wrong is a problem in the engine itself–a loose screw nobody noticed that gradually rattles free.

Either way, once the momentum is gone, it feels like getting the engine started again is a near-impossible task.

It’s not. What I need to do to get started again is generate words: one word, then the next. Easiest thing in the world to do. They don’t even have to be good words, just words that exist. Even a handful will do it.

The engine feeds on words. Everything after that is navigation, and you do that once the whole machine is up and running again.

Sharkandos, Zombie Tidal Waves, and Verisimilitude

PETERMBALL Writing Advice - Craft & Process ,

Last week, my partner showed me the trailer for the next film from Ian Ziering and the guys who did all those Sharknado films, a little flick they’ve dubbed ZOMBIE TIDAL WAVE. For those who haven’t seen it yet, I encourage you to take a look:

As fans of large chunks of the Sharknado franchise, we’re naturally excited about this film. It looks decidedly B-Grade and terrible, but at least 50% of the time this combination of actor and director have taken a terrible concept and made it into something far more interesting. They pushed the ambition of the film and played things straight, delivered above and beyond what was expected of them.

The other 50% of the time–I’m looking at you, Sharknado 4–they blew it by playing things for laugh.

I did a write up of what made a really good Sharknado films in my newsletter after we rewatched the series last year. It ran a little something like this:

I am known, among my friends, for complaining loudly about the fact that Sharknado 4 is the worst of the franchise because it finally gets silly. Peter, they tell me, it’s a series about shark-infested tornado, it’s already quite silly.
 
It is. That’s part of what people love about the series: it’s terribly silly, terribly goofy, and altogether unrealistic. It’s also why I point people towards Sharknado one through four in order to study how silly concepts can be made to work as a narrative (and, weirdly, become a cultural phenomenon).
 
The key thing to look for, in the first few instalments of the franchise, are the way they handle internal consistence and establish the rules of the milieu. Once you accept that sharkando’s are possible, everything in the films make sense: people are killed by flying sharks and they are grieved; sharkando’s get worse in silly ways, but they are treated as threats with dire consequences; madcap, absurd solutions are offered, but they are merely a natural escalation of things that have worked before. More importantly, those solutions make  sense in the broader genre of the monster movie and natural disaster movies, playing with tropes we already know and love.
 
This means, as a reviewer, you can suspend your disbelief while acknowledging the absurdity. Things are silly, but because the characters in the film respond to sharknado’s like they’re a serious thing, there is an internal chain of cause and effect that makes sense and escalates the sense of threat.
 
Sharknado 4 is the part of the franchise where they lose that, leaning harder on pastiche. Characters die, but they are not grieved and thus their deaths hold no emotional weight. The internal consistency of the film is broken in order to make way for parodies of other films, which means the characters are increasingly aware of the fact they’re in a fictional construct, even if they don’t acknowledge it as such.
 
The character’s no longer feel the threat because they are fictional constructs, which means the threat is no longer means something.

You can get away with incredibly silly concepts, so long as they’re taken seriously by the characters. It’s largely how I write fiction about killer mimes that float about on balloons, or cities laid waste by kaiju only half the world can see. The line between slapstick, absurd, and horror is largely one of internal integrity and the way character’s respond to what’s happening in the narrative.

Notes from the Brain Jar, 13 July 2018

I think about this kind of thing a lot because starting a goofy-but-serious horror franchise is on my bucket list of things to do with Brain Jar Press. It’s one of those projects that’s a long way out of my comfort zone as a writer, but the idea of taking an absolutely moronic idea and playing it as straight as I can appeals to me on all kinds of levels.

Of course, figuring out the kind of goofball combinations that result in title like Sharknado or Zombie Tidal Wave is an art all of its own.

Short Stories That Are No Longer Short Stories & Load Bearing Ambitions

PETERMBALL Writing Advice - Craft & Process

Yesterday was a weird writing day.

I’m working on a short story at the moment, scribbling a couple of pages in a notebook every day, locking down the details as I go. Yesterday the rough draft hit forty-odd pages, rolling through the first major gear change in the plot, and my momentum ground to a halt in the space of a page. For the first time since I started, I’d written less than a page.

Now, yesterday was a not-terribly-good day, but other writing still got done on other projects. I did the usual self-recrimination and doubt that comes when you stall out on a project–the inner monologue of lo, it has finally been revealed, I am rubbish and the ideas are gone and I will never do good work again–and then put my writing away at 6:00 PM and went out to eat tea and watch Netflix.

This morning I’m pondering the issue with a clearer head. Less angst, more analysis. Thinking through what it is that’s got me stuck, looking back at what’s come before to see what I’ve set up that I’m now ignoring, or what tangent have I started that’s a departure that does not fit and now need to include set-up if I want to keep it? The problem with the third act is invariably in the first, as movie writers are fond of saying, and some days you just need to apply the Kress protocol and get on with it.

I’ve done that a few times in this story, when I’ve followed an idea in the wrong direction. Usually I’ll pull myself up after four or five paragraphs, recognise that I’ve made a wrong turn and go back and make a different (usually harder) choice.

The problem this time went all the way back to the beginning, because the story had simply grown too long. 40 pages of handwritten story is approximately 8,000 to 10,000 words on average, which means I’m moving beyond the realms of a short story and into the realms of a novelette, and the little idea about telescopes and alternate worlds that could sustain a 4,000 word story feels too slight for anything that long.

The events of the story, and the pacing of them, was more-or-less occurring at the pace they should be. But a short story is about one thing, more or less. You take an idea or a point of conflict, and you play it out in a condensed punch of fiction. As you get longer, you start developing layers, otherwise you risk that feeling that the story is too long to read and offering not enough in return. And with that in mind, I’m sensing the ambition of the story–how it’s told, where the tension in placed, what’s drawing the reader through the story–wasn’t up to carrying the weight.

Back when my former flatmate and I did the Trashy Tuesday Movie watching, ambition was one of those things that separated a really good bad movie from a really tedious one. A flawed work that strives and fails is inevitably more interesting than a competent work that stays within the lines and plays it safe.

Some films have lode-bearing ambition that will shore up their failings. Short stories and novels have the same, and I believe we respond to those ambitions in ways we can’t quite pinpoint.

Having realised that, I could start seeing the ways in which the story could be shored up. Where the load-bearing ambition of the story could change, where I could create contrasts and tensions that would carry the reader along for longer (Also how I could make the story shorter, more concise–but having thought of the more ambitious approach, it’s harder to go back and do less).