The Writing Week (Vol. 6) part 276 - That WHAM Moment

Ah, rewrites. How you are necessary. How you are exhausting.

It's been a long haul on my sci-fi spec (over 18 months now). For the most part, it has been a wonderful process. My writing partner is great and offers a superb learning opportunity (he has decades of industry experience and work). We (I) have churned out draft after draft, first of the treatment (at least seven major versions), and then the script (I've lost track - maybe five primary drafts with smaller edits in between). Now, we're just about there. 

My collaborator and I spent about 90 minutes on the phone last night going over his final set of notes on the most recent draft I sent him. For the most part, the notes were miniscule - this is a little confusing here, and I'm not quite sure we need this there. A couple larger notes will be fun to address. We're revising one of the characters from a scientist into more of an underworld entity, because the role he fills as a scientist is a duplicated later in more important scientist characters. He became a redundancy as we spoke, and all redundancies must go. We've also figured out how to further simplify the science, which will be fun if for no other reason that it will eliminate some of the headache of explaining the rulse of the world. 

One note, though, demanded a fair amount of chit chat before we decided we had to bite the bullet and forgo what I like to call the WHAM moment. Every script should have lots of "WHAM moments" - scenes, beats, or revelations that glue you to the edge of your seat. No amount of urgency to refill your popcorn or soda or to take a leak should be able to draw you away from a WHAM moment. These will typically occur around the tentpole scenes (inciting incident, act turns, midpoint, climax, etc.) but can be scattered throughout. Our inciting incident draws the protagonist from the everyday into the sci-fi world he was unaware of. He lands somewhere completely foreign to him, somewhere dangerous and devastating; this should be a WHAM moment. It's a big moment, but due to the rules of the world, we can't thrust him into the heart of the chaos. His emergence into this other realm, while jarring, takes place in a controlled environment, which is heated emotional, but not physical, implications. 

My partner and I went over this scene again and again. How can we get him into the chaos? What can go wrong that forces him there? Can we manipulate in a way that the moment he crosses the plane, he's in danger in a big way? That's what the scene should be. That's how we'll capture the audience and the reader in a big way. That's the WHAM moment. 

Ultimately, the rules of the world won't let it be so. Too many things would have to be fudged; too much would have to be explained (or worse, glossed over later). It just wouldn't work. Yes, we lose our WHAM moment, which is a shame, but we do so in order to preserve the rules we have established. Ultimately, though perhaps a less riveting exposure to this other realm, the rules have to trump the WHAM. We can't unravel the story for the sake of the scene. Who knows, maybe we'll figure out a solution. But for now, we have to suck it up on this one and proceed true to the story. 

On a side note, I've been working on editing my children's book further. For a project that has never been longer than 1,670 words, it is an incredibly difficult process. In fact, it is an incredibly difficult process because the project has never been longer than 1,670 words (and needs to be closer to 1,000). 

A friend who works in publishing suggested that I cut the nearly 1,700 word manuscript down to a thousand or so, since the age group of my targeted readership is low. It's a wise note, but cutting is easier said than done. I have excised some portions and looked for redundancies or areas to combine verses in order to truncate others, but the fewer words I have, the harder it becomes to strip further. I'm down to just under 1,350 words now, which is still probably too long, but I feel like I can't cut much more without eliminating entire parts of the story. What I can do, though (another suggestion from my friend) is to look at the verb choices and words I use. If I can't reduce the word count, I can at least make the existing words more active, imaginative, and magical. The goal is to make every single verse sing, which is a laborious, yet fun process. My goal is to be able to send it to my friend by Labor Day, so that she can put me in touch with agents soon after.   

The Writing Week (Vol. 6 ) part 275 - Need to Plan Next Projects

Half of your success as a writer will be determined by the strength of the screenplay you are trying to sell. The other half is determined by your ability to pitch and sell your next projects.

No agent/producer/lawyer/manager/studio wants a one-off writer. All those entities, whether they outright say it or not, are in the franchise business, and you, my friend, as a writer are a franchise. To be the most valuable commodity you can be, to get all of those people and buyers and businesses behind you, you need to give them a long-term reason. That reason, naturally, is a series of ideas you can continue to produce for them.

When I took my meeting at UTA (can it really almost have been three years ago already?), my manager worked with me to prepare three pitches for additional specs before I even got in the room with the agent. Sure, I had a strong script that we all thought would be a relatively easy sell (it wasn't - so sad), but that wasn't enough. No matter how great that one project was, my agent's time was more valuable than a single sale. I needed to show him that I'd be around working and earning for years to come. But, let's step back a moment - before UTA was even on the horizon for me, I was settling into a partnership with a pair of producers and a new (to me) manager. One of the very first things my manager asked for was another script of mine. He, too, was testing the waters of my writing; he was relieved when I said that the somewhat inferior script I gave him as a followup (the only other viable one I had on hand at the time) was an earlier script. It wasn't as strong, but I was younger when I wrote it. Similarly, if you recall, when I met with a publishing friend about my children's book, one of the first things she advised me to do was come up with other book ideas I could mention in meetings with potential agents. 

Clearly, having additional ideas is valuable - and it is best to keep them in the same genre as the project that you're gaining attention with, since that is where your strengths are most immediately visible to people who have only minimal, but favorable, exposure to your writing. Sometimes, though, it can be hard to focus on what's next when you're in the middle of a large project, or even when you're coming down onto the tail end of it. I recently got the (hopefully) last draft of the sci-fi collaboration to my partner. He liked it, and aside from a few notes we'll discuss in the coming days, didn't see the need for many more edits. If that's in fact the case, then we'll give it to our producer and representatives next. Barring glaring errors or holes that they might discover, we'll be fast approaching the "try to sell it" stage, which means looping my agent in. Yes, that same guy at UTA and, no, he's not aware I'm working on this yet. There's no reason for him to be until there's a product, since I haven't really been on his radar since the post-Apocalyptic spec failed to sell. But, the moment I call or email him to present him with a spec I wrote for a know director, all that will change. At least, it should. And I will be shooting myself in the foot if I don't have a laundry list of the next specs I want to write ready to give him. So it is time to put on my thinking cap, dust off the old ideas, and determine what projects I want to work on next. 

The Writing Week (vol. 6) part 274 - Busy, Productive Week

Sunday morning, 10am - I meet with a friend in the publishing industry to ask her about what my next steps and considerations should be for my children's book. She tells me that she's moving upstate in two hours. "What? Do you even have time to do this today?" She says she does, so while we wait in line for our bagels and coffee, I tell her I've decided to pursue getting it out there sooner rather than later, that I'm jazzed about it now and want to see if I can make anything happen with it. I give her the pitch and find myself sounding 100% like the token writer I've always tried to avoid being, "I'm really excited about the book. I believe in it and think that it can be great. No, I haven't thought much about the marketing yet, but I kind of thought that the idea itself would be the big grab."

Oy.

I dial it back a bit. My friend - who, by the way, came to our breakfast meeting with the names of agents she thinks might be a good fit - tells me I should come up with some followup book ideas. Of course! How dumb of me not to have considered this. When in school, the head of our department told my friends and I not to begin pitching to agents and managers until we had at least three projects we could talk about. No rep wants a one-time only client. They want someone who can become a franchise and a more guaranteed sell. D'uh. Silly me. Good to think on.

We part. She - to go move. I immediately head into my apartment and email her the book. That night, she reads it. The following day (her birthday), she texts me that she's read it, that she loves it and thinks it's fantastic. Notes forthcoming. 

Groovy.

So I set that pot on the backburner for the time being. Meanwhile, I need to get the current, and hopefully final (before sending to our representatives) draft of the sci-fi spec to my writing partner, W.A. He cautioned me earlier this week to take my time, to make sure that I've done a solid dialogue and action pass before giving it to him. We want to be able to send this incarnation to our producer and representatives soon, to essentially make this version the one we go out with. Sure, we're open to edits still, but we've identified everything we want the movie to be, and our hope is that we'll have nailed all of that in this draft. 

I spend a few weeks doing edits. Along the way, I trim dialogue and descriptions, but the main legwork is done on scenes and sequences, excising the fat, cutting what's no longer relevant, adding in scenes to fill in the gaps, and trimming back gratuitous elements. The script drops five pages. 

Before I send it to W.A., I pull up a PDF of the script on my iPad Mini, open Adobe Reader (a great, free app for editing PDFs), and spend two nights doing a thorough dialogue and action pass. I trim. Boy, how I trim. If there's a block of text that ends with one lone word on its own line, I reword the paragraph to cut that hanging line. Redundant dialogue goes. Description gets pared down, consolidated, clarified, and, when possible, nixed. The script drops four more pages.

Finally, I do a second dialogue-only pass. I use this to find further redundancies and to track the science in the script - how do the characters refer to everything, and where are the anomalies? I find a few instances that need edits. All that remains, now, is one tiny, though important, beat wherein the protagonist has to realize something. I know what he finds out; I just have to plant something that helps him discover it. The options to do this are manifold, yet I haven't settled on the right one. Once I do, the script goes out to W.A. for his approval. Perhaps, just perhaps, we'll get new eyes on it then.  

Should we Beware the New Batman?

Holy CGI Batman! Cartoon Network debuted Beware the Batman last month, an all new, half hour animated show featuring Gotham City's Dark Knight. There have been a slew of Batman shows in the past two decades, the Holy Grail of them still being Batman: The Animated Series (TAS), which debuted in 1992. So how does this latest offering stack up?

Beware the Batman is unique among the Batman television show family in that it's computer animated. The producers went with a novel approach to the show's aesthetic, and, though different, it's not always successful. While some of the character designs are intriguing (and not the similarities in the character design below, despite the different mediums), the show is plagued by vacuous landscapes. All of Gotham seems wide, sprawling, and empty. Whereas in Batman: TAS the streets were cluttered with pedestrians, motorists, and litter, Beware is perpetually devoid of background players (as if worried about the cost of retaining extras for an animated show). Every set piece is barren - little to no art on the walls, expansive, monochromatic rooms and buildings, unbroken, window-less facades on most of Gotham's edifices. Everything just feels empty, which gives the show a ghostly, skeletal feel. Where are all the Gothamites Batman fights to save? So far, we've only seen criminals and allies, very few of anyone else. 

The trimmed down set design is reflected in the costume design, as well. In the most recent episode, a character was woken up in the middle of the night; though he'd been tucked soundly in his bed, he was still wearing his slacks and blazer from when he was first introduced. Sure, most cartoons adopt unchanging looks for each character, but not at the expense of aesthetic variation.  

The animators of Batman: TAS employed an unusual tactic in order to achieve the look of their iconic show - rather than animate it on white paper, they used black paper as the foundation of each illustration, giving the show a dark, menacing, perpetually shadowy feel. It was beautiful. Beware the Batman, while unique, seems to have been deliberately pared back, a decision I'm not sure works in the series' favor.

Out of a desire to achieve a new look, feel, and sound, and to feature a younger, slightly less veteran Batman, the show's producers decided not to cast the formidable Kevin Conroy as Batman. Conroy has been the definitive voice of Batman since 1992, beginning with Batman: The Animated Series and through The New Batman Adventures, Batman Beyond, and the animated Justice League series of the early 2000s. He reprised his role as the Caped Crusader in the Arkham video game series. Antony Ruivivar plays Bruce Wayne/Batman this go around; his big break came in 1999, when he appeared as a series regular as a paramedic in NBC's Third Watch. Since then, Ruivivar has played mostly cops and the like. He's a fine actor, but he's not the authoritative Conroy, and his Batman is a shade below menacing, whereas Conroy's was three shades above.

Tonally, Beware is a bit all over the map. Some moments are played clearly for the younger demographic - slapstick moments and youthful humor. The humor, then, is followed up with a moment of darkness or violence that can't help but seem incongruent. Batman: TAS trusted its viewers to handle darker subject matter with a maturity that modern cartoons seem to feel inappropriate for children. Young viewers will absorb what's at their level, and might or might not question what's not. But they don't need to be catered to - part of their development is contingent upon being exposed to heavier material, and it's a shame that fewer modern cartoons embrace that mentality.

All of the above, however, is not to say that Beware the Batman is intrinsically flawed. One of the greatest aspects of the show, especially for true fans, is that the producers decided to scrap the regular cast of rogues and showcase ones that are rarely if ever taken out of the comics. Professor Pyg, a recent villain, was the antagonist in the premier. He's been followed by Magpie, Anarky (rumored to be the primary villain), and Lady Shiva's League of Assassins. Comics fans will recognize these (and other) antagonists as interesting rogues seldomly offered screen treatment. New takes on uncommon villains are exactly what a Batman show needs to hold its own these days. Perhaps we owe our thanks to Christopher Nolan, whose Batman trilogy brought us The Scarecrow, Ra's and Talia Al Ghul, Carmine Falcone, and other Gotham rogues to the big screen for the first time. Beware's decision to introduce a cadre of villains beyond The Joker, Two-Face, Penguin, and Catwoman is commendable and will keep me coming back each Saturday.

Beware the Batman is fun for fans and a worthy 22-minute foray into Gotham each week, but it's still no Batman: The Animated Series. Of course, maybe I'm just a fanboy who grew up watching what's been hailed as undoubtedly one of the best cartoons ever, Batman or other.

The Writing Week (Vol. 6) part 273 - Back in the Groove

This past week has been good - really good. My creative juices have started flowing again, and the deluge has been fast and fruitful. And I think I have to attribute at least part of that to having multiple project to work on. (The other factor in the equation is a burning drive to move forward on a couple projects quickly and bring them to completion.)

For starters, I've really gotten back into the sci-fi spec. I'd taken some time off to travel, await notes from my producer, and regroup. I'm off an running now, and it feels awesome. I started with linear edits, working my way forward from page one, tackling major revisions first and saving smaller, less readily apparent edits and cuts for a second pass, which I'll do in a few days (I hope). My writing partner, W.A., and I identified five or six primary elements that we wanted to address. There are plenty of smaller issues throughout the script that still need tightening or editing, but the bulk of the work was going to be those half dozen points. To date, I've tackled all but two. I'm really pleased with the progress so far, but it won't be until I do the read-through that I'll really have a good sense of how it's all coming together. (I've abandoned the chronological editing approach and am now doing it piecemeal, which is fine, but can be disorienting and lead to omissions or redundancies.) W.A. and I would like this to be the final draft before we show the script to our reps, and I hope to be able ot get it to him within the next ten days or so.

In addition to the screenplay, if you recall, I had been working on a short children's book, which I completed a draft of a couple weeks ago. A few tweaks later, I think it's ready to see the light. I've sent it to the League for our August meeting, as well as to a few other friends. More than that, though, I've reached out to contacts I have in the publishing industry and have asked to take a few of them out for coffee (independently) to pick their brains a bit. Normally, I would advocate that writers, especially screenwriters, get a few rounds of feedback and push through a couple drafts of a script, at least, before contacting people who have the potential to help get the product sold. But, I'm bucking my own advice here; I believe in the product and, though perhaps a poor excuse, given the brevity of the work, feel that I am in a strong enough place with it to at least initiate the conversations I want to have to help bring it into being. The League's feedback will be much appreciated - hopefully they don't turn around and reveal fatal flaws to me or tell me it flat out sucks - but so far, response has been pretty glowing. If I have friends who can point me in the right direction, I want to learn as much as possible about what considerations I ought to take into account to move ahead with the project.

Lastly, a few weeks back, Onyx proposed a writing project to the League. His idea was simple: we each take turns writing one page (and one page only) of a screenplay. No outlining, no group discussion on the type of story we're telling; just writing. He wrote the first page. I took a long time, but finally delivered the second. Now, it's off to the rest of the group for their contributions. Theoretically, we'll each get about 18 turns before the six of us produce a feature-length script. I'm just as curious as anyone to see where this script goes.

Writers Group Alert

New York playwrights, this one's for you! I just saw a posting on Playbill.com for writers to join a weekly writing group. If you have a play you've been working on, or the idea for a play, this could be a great opportunity to get some solid, useful feedback on it. Being in The League has been tremendous for my writing, so I know first-hand the benefits of being in a writers group. 

Just keep in mind a few things if you join/form a writers group:

1) The point of these groups is to share your work and get feedback on it; don't be shy. Produce pages, show them to the group, but...

2) Be open to receiving honest feedback. This means that you might not get 100% praise all the time. Writers group members should be open not only to getting constructive criticism, but also to giving it. Don't shut down or become overly defensive if people start to tell you that your story isn't working or hitting yet. You're there to make your piece as strong as it can be, and sometimes outside readers can more readily tell if something isn't adding up than the author can.

 3) At the same time, keep in mind that you're not competing with the other members, and your jobs isn't to tear their work apart - it's to help them. If someone wrote something that is mind blowingly good, praise them. Good for them. You might be pissed your work isn't at that level yet, but wit your group members' help, it will get there. 

4) Lastly, even if you didn't respond well at all to a play/script, it always helps to try to find something positive to incorporate into your feedback, even if for no other reason than to maintain good relations among the members of the group. The group meetings should be as open and honest as possible, and bad blood makes that difficult to achieve.

Good luck to any who sign up for the group! May it help you produce many beautiful plays. 

The Writing Week (vol. 6) part 272 - Children's Book Draft Done

Yikes - I've fallen... a bit behind schedule here. I could tell you that, though I haven't posted an update in a while, I've been writing regularly. But that, my friends, would be a fabulation, and because I love you, I don't want to lose your trust, dear readers. 

The truth is, I was in Iceland. Yes, the land of Vikings and Blue Lagoons and fermented rotten shark. It was beautiful, but unproductive as far as my writing is concerned. Now, lest I sound like a total shirker, my writing partner and I were awaiting notes from our producer, which were supposed to come in while I was on vacation. (We got them a few days after I got back, so no worries there.) 

About a week after I touched back down at JFK, W.A. (my collaborator) and I were on the phone going over the notes, picking and choosing the ones we wanted to address. We had a great two-hour discussion in which we recrafted a lot of the weakest parts of the script. W.A.'s really excited to get it out there and see if we can sell it (I'd be lying if I said I wasn't, but after years of near-hits and aggravating misses, I have learned to temper my excitement quite a bit). The work is on me to get it to a place where we can go out by summer's end. Despite the fact that the edits are not unsubstantial, I think it's quite doable.

In the meantime, I decided to pour myself into my inaugural children's book. I attempted some free form writing, but realized that I was rambling and ambling without direction. So, I sat down for a night and outlined the book. It's short - barely two thousand words - and the story is far from the most involved that I have ever worked on. Still, there are about eight main beats to it, and I wanted to get them all down in order and fleshed out. Afterward, the writing came smoothly, and I got it done in about four sessions. I was home in Arlington, VA with my family for the weekend and gave them a preview reading. Reviews were favorable (old saying about not relying on your mom to be your critic aside). I found a few lines I need to edit, but I'm content enough with the draft to set the project aside temporarily, as far as editing goes, and to get back to the sci-fi spec for W.A.

While I work on the sci-fi collaboration, I'd like to see what if any traction I can get with the children's book. I know nothing about the children's book publishing world, but I have a few connections to people that do. I'll ask them and see what they say. More so, I think I probably need to find an illustrator before I show it to the industry. Though this will be a back-burner project for a bit, it will be fun to have something to occupy my mind in addition to the sci-fi spec. And it's a whole new type of writing project for me; that, in and of itself, has been gratifying - and a welcome return to storytelling after my month-plus hiatus.