Category: Writing Advice – Craft & Process
Writing Advice - Craft & Process

Seven Things Writers Can Learn from Watching Suckerpunch (2011)

I’m going to be clear: I hate this movie. Loathe it. With the kind of intensity you get by capturing a couple of thousand suns in a nuclear reactor and focusing it into a very, very destructive kind of laser. When we first watched it, very early on in the #TrashyTuesdayMovie annals, it bored me to the point where I gave up actually commenting on the movie and just started live-tweeting 10 ways I would have my revenge on Zack Snyder for the creation of this film. Having re-watched the film in preparation for this post, I find myself revisiting said list and wondering if I was overly generous: 1: Dropped in a vat of piranha, who eat him slow motion while Army of Me plays over the action. #Suckerpunched 2: Getting kicked in the nuts, repeatedly, by film-makers who actually have talent #Suckerpunched 3: Being left to starve after having both legs crushed by a tank #Suckerpunched 4: Fatal

PeterMBall 08/07/2014
Writing Advice - Craft & Process

Five Books about Narrative Structure (And a Final Caveat About their Usage)

So last week, when my post about Hellboy II was doing the rounds of the social medias, my friend Brendan dropped past and said, more or less, “I wish I knew one percent of what you know about plotting.” Now Brendan is one of those guys who is both intensely smart and incredibly nice, so when he says stuff like that, my response tends to be something along the lines of “Well, shit, Brendan, that’s easy. Pretty much all I know, I picked up from reading a handful of books. I can put together a reading list, if you want.” Hence we have another blog post featuring a list of books, this time focused on the subject of plotting and writing, although it occurred to me that the most useful thing in terms of understanding the structure wasn’t reading the books. No, what really forced me to get my head around it was tutoring a scriptwriting class taught by Marcus

PeterMBall 07/07/2014
Writing Advice - Craft & Process

The World’s Worst Story Opening (And How To Do It So It Works)

Back in May, Chuck Wendig did this post about breaking rules. I like Chuck. He’s a smart guy. Knows his shit when he talks about writing, too, which is why we flew him out as a guest for last year’s GenreCon. But I’ve gotta admit, when he put up his post saying, well, fuck the rules, and included the following list of rules worth fucking, it kinda made my testicles crawl into my body and seek refuge from the terror he’d unleashed upon the world: Don’t open on weather. Don’t open with a character looking in a mirror. Don’t open on a character just waking up. (Wendig, IN FICTION, NOTHING IS FORBIDDEN, EVERYTHING IS PERMITTED) Oh, Jesus, I thought. Why in hell would you tell people that? Don’t you realise what you’re unleashing on the world? Those poor fucking editors. Hell, those poor writers. DAMMIT, WENDIG, WHY ARE YOU USING YOUR POWERS FOR EVIL? Then I got distracted. ‘Cause deadline’s wait for no fucking

PeterMBall 03/07/2014
Writing Advice - Craft & Process

Seven Things Writers Can Learn From Watching Hellboy II: The Golden Army (2008)

I re-watched Hellboy II: The Golden Army recently. Not, alas, as part of the #TrashyTuesdayMovie series, which is on hiatus for the foreseeable future, but simply ‘cause I was in the mood for a certain type of movie and Hellboy II was in my DVD collection, waiting to be watched, and I found it before I found my copy of Blade: Trinity. One of the nice things about re-watching movies—particularly movies that fit into the flawed-but-interesting category, such as this one—is the way it allows you to look for patterns. What starts out as a disappointing movie experience gradually mutates into a narrative puzzle; you take it apart, look at all the components, and figure out how you’d take an alternate route. Somewhere at the core of Hellboy II is a brilliant genre film with mass-market appeal, a film that’s both pulpy and smart in equal measure. A film, quite frankly, that does exactly what Victor Shklovsky says all art should do—make

PeterMBall 01/07/2014
Writing Advice - Craft & Process

Jim Butcher on Scenes and Sequels

So I’ve been doing this writing thing for a while now. Eighteen years, more or less, once you factor in the time spent working on poetry, scripts, gaming stuff, an unfinished thesis, and stories as a collective whole. I still go out and learn to do stuff. And I still read stuff where I am thoroughly fucking schooled and have the way I think about writing turned on its head. Case in point: this one-two combination from 2006 or so where Jim Butcher talks about Scenes (which is stuff I know) and Sequels to Scenes (which blew my writer-brain in no uncertain terms). The sequel stuff feels like someone just sat down and wrote a short essay that basically says, “hey, you, short story writer, this is why you struggle with novels.” Go forth and read it.  

PeterMBall 31/01/2014
Writing Advice - Craft & Process

What Writers Ought to Know About Die Hard, Part Two

So my friend Kevin was in town this weekend to talk about a project he’s putting together, which meant we spent a lot of time talking about narrative structure and the way character works and how to do a lot of effective storytelling without wasting too much time on things. Die Hard, unfortunately, wasn’t in the list, but it’s amazing how much you start noticing when your reading of an episode/movie moves from the passive to the active. I do this kind of thing for fun, since I’m kinda obsessed with structure, and even I start noticing different things when I have to actively explain how things work to someone else. What follows is a pretty close examination of the Die Hard‘s first act, which means we’re going to spend a whole bunch of words looking over what’s effectively just twenty minutes of film. This post will probably stand alone, but it builds on some of the things I mentioned

PeterMBall 13/08/2013
Writing Advice - Craft & Process

What Writers Ought to Know About Die Hard (Part One)

Normally, when I sit down to write a Trashy Tuesday Writing School post, it’s because I’m trying to redeem some element of sitting down and watching a terrible movie. Films like the Josh Kirby series, which started badly and ended badly and reached a high water mark around number 3, or Speed Racer, which is a triumph of style but a massive failure as a script, or Robot Jox with…well, you get the picture. I should not that trashy isn’t applied to these films as a statement of quality – I adore the Speed Racer film for its ambition, and loathe Josh Kirby for…well, reasons that will require a blog post of their own. Trashy is instead used as an aesthetic judgement, a way of categorizing films that are unified by a sense of pop-cultural kitsch and the ability to seep into the popular consciousness. True, not all trashy films are good. In fact, most of them are pretty terrible;

PeterMBall 06/08/2013
Writing Advice - Craft & Process

Four Things Writers Can Learn From The Josh Kirby Films

So we spent a couple of weeks making our way through the first few films in the Josh Kirby, Time Warrior series for the #TrashyTuesdayMovie. After the first week I more-or-less swore I wouldn’t do a Trashy Tuesday Writing School post about this series until we hit the end, but the contrast between the first film (which was dull and awful) and the second film (which was an batshit crazy and awful) was marked enough that I kinda changed my mind. The first Josh Kirby film, Planet of the Dino-Knights, probably ranks among the most god-awful films we’ve watched on a Tuesday night thus far. It’s not quite bad enough to slip into my bottom five, but it’d certainly earn its spot in the bottom ten. The second film, The Human Pets, is better, but it’s greatest strength is being not-quite-as-poorly-made as its predecessor. In this respect, they’re actually an interesting duology in terms of the lessons they hold for

PeterMBall 02/07/2013
Writing Advice - Craft & Process

Pick Your Poison: Upcoming Trashy Movie Writing Schools

Every now and then, my flatemate and I argue about whose responsible for the ongoing #TrashyTuesdayMovie phenomenon. I say the blame is entirely his, since he’s the one who maintains the schedule and the associated wiki and generally makes sure that we have copies of the movie. He blames me on account of the fact that I continue to show up and tweet every week, and I keep talking it up among people I know. Also, that people I know keep adding fucking films to the list. I think, with the creation of a banner graphic to accompany this post, I have officially lost the argument. Not that it’s a great banner, nor even likely to be the final version, but I was having a slow evening and felt the need to crack open photoshop. Tonight we’re going to kick off the first of Six goddamn Josh Kirby films, which I gather are actually one long film that’s been broken up

PeterMBall 28/05/2013
Works in Progress

Nine Things Writers Can Learn From Watching Robot Jox (1989)

Robot Jox is a fucking awful movie. It’s got an average review rating of 4.9 on IMDB, which is actually pretty good for something we watch as part of the Trashy Tuesday Movie series (and if you’re interested in seeing my immediate reactions to the film, the twitter stream is archived over on the TTM wiki), but it doesn’t change the basic problem. This film is a mess. A glorious, glorious mess. Personally I think people on IMDB are rating the film too high. Of course, I personally don’t really think Robot Jox deserves to be called a film, since it utterly fails to achieve all but the most basic requirements. I mean, it is filmed, and I suppose we could call what’s happening on the screen acting if we’re being generous, but that’s really about it. And yet, I’m going to suggest you go find a copy of this absolute dogs breakfast of a movie if you’ve got an

PeterMBall 23/05/2013
Writing Advice - Craft & Process

Why King’s “On Writing” Can be Dangerous to New Writers

So my boss caught up on the Novella Dairy yesterday and commented on the fact that I was crapping on Stephen King in my post asking for feedback about the future of the project. “I crapped on Stephen King?” I said. “I don’t remember doing that.” “Sure you do,” she said. “You basically quote him and then talk about all the ways he’s wrong. You’re all It’s all very well for Stephen King to write about sitting in the chair until he hits 2K a day, but some of us have day jobs…” I’ll admit, at this point, that my record of this conversation probably isn’t 100% accurate, but it captures the gist. It refers back to an ongoing conversation we’ve had at work, where I’ve brought up the fact that I think On Writing has the potential to be a dangerous resource for some new writers and it bothers me that it’s so…omnipresent, I guess, as a source of advice.

PeterMBall 22/05/2013
Writing Advice - Craft & Process

On Writing In the Morning

Putting this one here as a kind of addendum to my last post: it’s time to start bringing the laptop to work and spending my morning writing-shift down in the State Library cafe. With everything being all NOW NOW NOW inside my head in the lead-up to GenreCon, it’s becoming increasingly easy to come into work early and start putting out fires (metaphorically speaking) related to the event. This isn’t why I come into work early every morning. Much as I like my job, I don’t like it enough that I’m willing to spend an extra hour a day working on it without getting paid (well, I am, as evidenced by the fact that I’ve stayed late to get some urgent stuff done a couple of times in the last month, but I’m not willing to give my job this particular writing hour).  The morning writing shift has become increasingly sacred to me over the last couple of months, which is weird, ’cause I’m

PeterMBall 17/10/2012