Wonder Woman Spoilers Within...

Wonder Woman is so good. It might be the best DC movie of all time. Yes, I know it’s nerdy sacrilege to down talk how good The Dark Knight is, but Wonder Woman represents a lot more - and I’m not just talking about feminism, I’m talking about the potential for the DC universe and comic book movies as a whole.

Let’s break down what makes Wonder Woman good. First, Gal Gadot. Gal Gadot is Diana Prince in the same way that Robert Downey Jr. is Tony Stark. Gal Gadot was a good actress before this, if a little underrated. But as Wonder Woman, she hits a stride, she carries herself like Diana, talks like Diana, fights, walks, etc. just like you can imagine Wonder Woman doing. Gal Gadot is gentle, loving, compassionate but at the same time she is hard, assertive and fierce. Gal Gadot makes Wonder Woman jump off the screen.

Wonder Woman also stands for something. This goes back to a previous blog post where I discuss what superheroes are lacking these days; standing for something. I truly feel like Wonder Woman is a blessing because it teaches us that you can be fierce, hard but also loving and compassionate. Wonder Woman is a ferocious soldier, but she doesn’t fight for a war because she is entrenched in patriotism or loyalty to one side or the other; she has no concern of what her actions will do to the economy, she doesn’t care if the British win. She cares that the good guys win.

Patty Jenkins, director of Wonder Woman, also achieves a teaching that George R. R. Martin has been trying to say since 1996. Martin has gone on record as saying that A Song of Ice and Fire was written as a way to convey that evil is done through men - not some mysterious and all powerful dark lord. Wonder Woman has a beautiful and powerful moment between Gadot and the male lead discussing the choices of men. Perhaps there is no God of War influencing men and women, leading the armies and killing innocent. Perhaps men are inherently evil. Diana is so shook by this she refuses to believe. It’s later revealed that Ares is involved, but only as an accomplice; and to the British, not the Germans - showing Diana that men are the problem. And it’s done in such an elegant and powerful way that it leaves you wondering; if Ares was involved, why are there wars after World War 1?

Finally, and this may be a bit more technical, is that Wonder Woman is the first literary superhero movie that makes sense. What does that mean? In the world of entertainment, a lot of people perceive pieces of media as either commercial or as literary. Commercial pieces are made to appeal to as many audience members as possible, have serious moments, teachable moments, laughing moments, fighting moments - and they’re all tailored to a particular market. It’s made to pump out and make money. Think about James Patterson novels, the “next big” series that you’ll forget in five years or most comic books now.

The literary, on the other hand, are made slowly. With time and care. They usually cater to a specific market, teach a specific thing or have a specific meaning. Good literary writers can write about a specific thing and make it feel universal. This is largely the difference between the Marvel and DC films. Most of the Marvel films feel very commercial (that’s not a bad thing, just a different thing) while the DC films tried so hard to be literary - until now.

Congratulations Gal Gadot, Patty Jenkins and the rest of the cast and crew that worked on Wonder Woman. I look forward to seeing what comes next.

Scope, or How Little Should My Story Be?

Stories have a problem nowadays of being too big. This isn’t, inherently, a bad thing - but everyone is obsessed with being much bigger than they need to. Often, stories that are smaller in scope connect with people better and have a much heavier impact.

The biggest modern culprit of being “too big” is Doctor Who. The scope of the show has gone from making an audience care about a time-traveling alien with two hearts to throwing the pacifist into wars where the very foundation of all times and all realities are the stakes. The problem is that since it’s a successful show, and thus a successful product, the producers keep having to face the fact that those stakes need to be played up.

Upping the stakes is a common, and effective, way to keep an audience engaged from episode-to-episode. But there’s a point (all times and all realities, seriously?) where the stakes get too big, and your original stakes get lost. The purpose of the story, and the characters, get lost. Other stories have a plan to control or maintain their scope. Take the Marvel Cinematic Universe for example. Phase One was a great culmination of stakes. All the players had their own personal stories; Captain America and the Red Skull, Iron Man faced an enemy in his father’s company, and In Iron Man 2 dealt with some of the fallout from that and Thor faced his father, his maturity and his brother. Then we get to Avengers where they’re brought together to fight bits and pieces of all three of those things.

But the MCU faltered a bit at the end of Phase Two with Age of Ultron. One of the biggest problems in that movie is that it feels out of place, and the reason why is because it has a scope problem. Ultron isn’t really more dangerous or threatening in the movies. He doesn’t really bring anything more to the table. In fact, many of the standalone Phase Two movies are bigger in scope (Thor: Dark World) than Age of Ultron and even those movies suffer from that because the scope is off-kilter.

So far, Phase Three has wound those problems up. Doctor Strange and Guardians of the Galaxy vol 2 are both fairly standalone, so their scope doesn’t necessarily hurt the rest of the MCU (the exception being the comparison of the first Guardians to the second). Even Captain America: Civil War was a downscaled scope, significantly more of a personal story than an Earth-threatening apocalypse - but that works because it integrated the scope of its surroundings. For as personal and small of a story as Civil War is, it makes sense to the characters and to the setting. It doesn’t need to be a huge monstrous threat to be a good story.

The final scope that I’m going to talk about is the unclear scope. For as many scope problems as Doctor Who has, the most important part of scope is the expectation. One of my favorite shows of all time, Lost, suffers from this. Many people had huge expectations about answers, mysteries, time travel, Smoke Monsters, etc. because that’s what the show presented. But the reality is that Lost is a show about people and their relationships. Yes, strange, crazy stuff happens to them - but the story isn’t about the stuff, it’s about the people.

People expected, and wanted, the scope to be massive and life-shattering, Earth-threatening and stuff like that. And, yes, they had that - but that wasn’t the story they were trying to tell.

Scope should be looked at as small, instead of large. How small can you make it while still having a deep impact? If you need a large scope for the story you’re trying to tell, the villain you’re trying to make real, or the characters you’re trying to relate - then do it. But try not to have a big scope for the sake of having a big scope.

Superheros And What They Stand For...

Superheroes used to stand for something. That isn’t to say that heroes don’t mean anything anymore, or that they don’t stand for anything. But it’s hidden under layers of marketing, 50+ years of continuity and an attempt to sell nostalgia instead of a true attempt to stand for something. Superheroes are often glorified commercialization now.

A recent conversation with another writer got me to thinking about what I loved about comics and superheroes as a kid and whether or not the fundamental joy is still there. And if it isn’t, why do I throw $30 or more a week at my local comic store (other than it being an awesome store)?

I like reading about superheroes because I like being a part of something. A lot of the stuff that I read is discussed with like minded individuals. I interact with lots of comic fans at my work (both co-workers and people I do business with), and so the conversations are great. I also belong to several comic-themed subreddits. I remember during Blackest Night there was so much conversation Wednesday nights and Thursdays when I was a kid after the comics hit the shelf. It was amazing to feel like you were part of something. This is the same joy I got from watching Lost live.

On top of that, a lot of the characters were relatable and allowed me to feel super by putting myself in their shoes. This is great for me, but a lot of people don’t feel this one is accurate. This is definitely a personal truth for me, and I recognize it’s not a universal truth. Clearly I can’t relate exactly to a space alien who’s invincible and recharges with the sun, but I did relate to growing up in a small town and learning a lot morals the same way that Clark did.

Most importantly, superheroes used to be deeper in the same way things like A Series of Unfortunate Events and Lost are deeper. On the surface, they’re very commercial products meant to sell their brand, just like comics. But they were always deeper. Lost isn’t just about this island with great mysteries and time travel and polar bears. Those are elements that help tell a story about a dozen broken people who get a second chance and how they deal with being put on an island. Just like Superman isn’t about an invincible man flying around the world beating up bad guys with no problem - Superman is about a man who struggles with his morals constantly, who tries to be a beacon of hope in a shitty world. Yea, Lex Luthor is a genius mastermind with a power suit and they have some good fights. But Lex Luthor is also a morally corrupt selfish politician who tries to manipulate people to get his way - that’s why he’s a good villain.

And that’s what a lot of comics now have lost. With 50+ years of continuity and storytelling, comic publishers are looking for hooks to sell characters that have been wrung dry. This means getting away from the moralistic tellings of old comic books and trying whatever’s new or “flashy”. And that creates a problem. If in your first arc the big threat is to the city, then your next arc has to be bigger - the thought is that if the stakes aren’t higher than your story isn’t growing. Eventually, you get to what I call the Doctor Who fallacy where your threat is so big it’s kind of ridiculous.

The reality is that a lot of the best comic stories are personal, or have an underlying moral or point instead of just saying “every timeline is at risk if we don’t X”!

I could go on about this, but instead this is where I’m going to talk about my next book. Right now I’m calling it Firestarter and it’s the start of a Young Adult Superhero series. The first draft is about halfway done. There’s a lot of superhero ideas still out there, and this series is going to capture a lot of those ideas while pairing them with interesting, modern themes that will hopefully reach a new generation of superhero fans!

Stephen King, Character and Endings

About 8 years ago I wrote a short story called Stephen King is the Anti-Christ. I wrote it on a cruise during my first honeymoon. I had brought one of his short story collections to read with me on the plane. The story came to me as sort of a meta-poke at King in his Dark Tower series and the book Misery. It was a story about an author who tried over and over again to get published and when it eventually happens he is drowned in popularity and keeps pumping out books at an unreal rate.

The catch is that the writer has sold his soul to the devil to become insanely popular, but now his books are coming true and coming to haunt him. At the end of the story the writer takes his place at the right hand of Satan to become the anti-Christ and begins writing the events from the Book of Revelations. It was a lot longer than most of my other short stories (about 40 pages), and the name of the character in the book wasn’t named Stephen King (admittedly it was something like Steve Krall).

I want to love Stephen King. I’ve read his On Writing a dozen times. I’ve read the books in The Dark Tower series a few times (except for The Wind Through the Keyhole and The Dark Tower, which I’ve only read once each). I still work my way through his other works, I follow him on Twitter and Facebook and I can’t even begin to tell you how excited I am for his upcoming Hulu show Castle Rock.

But, if I’m being honest with myself, his writing varies so wildly that I find myself curious how he got so popular. So I’m going to dissect a lot of King elements, and I’m going to start with what he does best: unparalleled to anyone else in the industry, characters. For the most part, King can make some killer characters. They’re super deep and have these absolutely stellar conversations, ticks and backgrounds. There are a few exceptions (I’m lookin’ at you Wendy Torrence you boring old bat) but for the most part King crafts so many great and wonderful characters that you feel like you could know them.

What is King not good at? Info dumps. One of the reasons some of these characters are so well crafted is because King will often pause the main narrative to force feed you facts and histories. Often paragraphs at a time. A lot of his post-2000’s books minimize this, but it’s still present.

As a matter of fact The Shining is one of the biggest culprits of this and it takes thirteen chapters for the family to actually arrive at the hotel. That’s right, the first thirteen chapters are mostly comprised of Jack interviewing, coming home, talking to his wife briefly - and King telling you about his characters. Does this work? Yea, sure. It’s King, he can break the rules, right?

We were listening to The Shining on Audible on our way to a book signing (I hope you got out for Bookstore Day last weekend), and about 2 hours in I paused it and had a discussion with my wife. The crux of the conversation being: if King’s name wasn’t on this, would you still be reading it? The clear answer was no.

The last thing that King does that I’m going to talk about is something that I do. It’s something several agents that I’ve queried and submitted to have said I’m doing wrong, and it’s something I’m very mindful of. Head hopping. This is a term that writers (and agents, and editors and publishers) use when they refer to changing point of view in writing without some kind of break.

King is the king of head hopping. It can happen a dozen times or more per chapter and without any kind of word break (like a page break, switching chapter or anything) if poorly done it can leave the reader confused. I’ve been told this dozens of times in the last ten years. When asked what point of view, I used to always say ‘third person’, but after the first few times I changed to be more specific: ‘third person omniscient’. Omniscient points out that the piece of work doesn’t have a single narrator, but instead encompasses multiple narrators, that the narrator is all knowing somehow or (more commonly) the narration of the story is not limited to a single point of view.

And here’s the catch. Even after that change agents will still ask for my submission and be caught off guard, or turn me down based on the fact that there’s head hopping. I’ve been pretty upset by this, but I’ve also asked a few agents about this and had some really thorough discussions on this - some have been able to say that head hopping isn’t for them and it’s just a taste thing (which I respect), while others flounder with their response or just don’t answer at all.

So to wrap this long winded post up I want to share the only bit of advice that King has in On Writing that matters: not everything works for everyone, find what works for you and stick to it.

Hidden Information and Expectations

There are lots of tough moments in being a writer. In addition to struggling over word choice, sentence structure, etc. there are certain expectations that writers don’t necessarily know they’re supposed to follow, the most obvious one being word counts. Lots of genres have different agent and publisher expectations of word count. This information is readily available on the internet (through a few different outlets with a little wiggle room in answer). It’s not put in front of the author. Even in agent submission websites. They will say they’re looking for Science Fiction but the hidden information there is that they expect the manuscript to be between 90k and 125k. While a different website recommends a much narrower 100k to 115k words.

Another difficult thing for writers is removing work. Often writers will remove up to 50% of their original manuscript in order to get it to the goal, make things more fast paced, improve the flow of the manuscript or (literally) hundreds of other reasons. This is often referred to as “killing your darlings” because we’re a bunch of people who want to rub elbows and tell inside jokes.

This often comes after spending weeks or months writing a draft, reading it, making some minor changes, giving it to critique partners, etc. Then someone points out that “X doesn’t particularly make sense”. X happens to be something you peppered into your manuscript at the beginning, so you have to remove it or change it so it does make sense.

Sometimes, though, changing that element doesn’t work. You spend hours (or maybe days) talking with people about how to change that particular element and how you can make it work. Sometimes you need to just step back, look at the big picture, and kill your darlings. Save that element for a different project, or perhaps a sequel.

There’s a third option. Shelf the project. Make notes, so you don’t forget what you were trying to do. Put it on the shelf and wait. Wait a month. Three months. Do another project. Keep working. Pick up your problem project when you’re done. Yes, it means that the project will take longer. Shigeru Miyamoto, Director of Nintendo and designer of the Legend of Zelda games once said “A delayed game is eventually good, a bad game is bad forever.” The same is true about books (and most other media, I imagine).

Here’s the important part; for readers and authors alike: this is okay. Books can be delayed. There’s a huge taboo in the world of entertainment right now about the delay of things. About how long it takes George R. R. Martin to write the next A Song of Ice and Fire books. About how far pushed back the next season of Westworld is. These are fine.

We like this content because of its quality. When we give less time to creators to spend on a project, we’re sacrificing quality for instant gratification. It took years to make Game of Thrones, and even more to make A Clash of Kings. There were two years a piece between the first three books, five years between A Storm of Swords and A Feast for Crows, and another six years before A Dance with Dragons! And it’s already been six years since then!

I have shelved a recent project. It broke my heart to do so. But the book will be better off in the long run because I did that. It was exhausting. I felt like a drug addict being walked in on while using. Like having all the puzzle pieces but not knowing the end result.

So a few weeks ago, I started something new.

Learning Curve

High School, am I right? I had all kinds of projects running all over the place. Only a few of them stayed with me. One in particular was a series that I had developed over a year or so after an assignment from my Creative Writing class. I’ll get to the project in a minute, but first I want to talk about some of the classes I took.

Arguably the most important was Creative Writing, which was led by Mrs. Vaughn - who was one of the most kind teachers I’d ever had and truly helped me foster my talent. She was a preacher’s wife and regularly put on get-togethers at her church for teenagers. I attended one once and appreciated what she was trying to do (create a controlled party in a town of 16,000 people - that’s right, we lived in Footloose), but it wasn’t for me.

This class was a throw away for most of the students who took it, which was fine by me. The class was 50 minutes of writing, three times a week. The fourth day, we would trade projects with someone else and read over their work. The fifth day, we  would each read one of our projects out loud. We had to turn in three projects a week, and between the three projects there had to be a total of seven pages.

The projects were mostly free style, but offered bonus points if you followed certain writing prompts facilitated by Mrs. Vaughn. I took advantage of these as often as I could, which was usually only once a week. More about these prompts later.

Weekly, I wrote a “What if?” journal that centered around our school being infested with a zombie plague. The school had weird railways and caves underneath it (in the story), that caused some of the students to split up. It was the first “on-going” project I ever took on, and it was the one I read to the class every week (this also saved several other students from reading theirs, which they thanked me for).

The next two classes were AP (Advanced Placement for those folks who haven’t been in High School for a while) Literature and Mythology. Mythology was a bit more hands on, like a traditional class, and helped me grasp a lot of the symbolism and writing formats. This is where I started really hammering down the Eragon impersonation, because we talked a lot about the Hero’s Cycle and Joseph Campbell in general. My teacher, unknowingly, opened a can of worms by using Star Wars as a comparison.

AP Lit was a similar format to Creative Writing, but instead of writing, it was 50 minutes of reading. We had a list of books we had to read, and turn in a report weekly on one of the books we’d finished. Once a month we would have a quiz on one of the required books.

So these classes, along with some others, like Speech, were really helpful for me and helped set the pace for what I wanted to do. It also provided me with a stable foundation for my future in writing.

One of the writing prompts from Creative Writing happened to be ‘rewrite your favorite story in a different genre’. My mind exploded, and I started writing down as many things as I could think of. The first one was Lord of the Rings as space opera. I fleshed out this galaxy where all the different planets in the galaxy were the different races and nations from Middle Earth and a humble delivery pilot came across something from ages past and had to take it to the other side of the galaxy to destroy it.

That was how the idea came to me. Admittedly, most of that idea had been laid by Tolkien decades ago. I filled half a notebook with ideas and notes and how to change this or tackle that (Gollum was a bounty hunter). Eventually it seemed much too big for me. So instead of writing it, it became a Dungeons & Dragons campaign I ran for my friends.

The second idea was a contemporary Harry Potter, without magic. I filled several notebooks about the details. I set it in a modern American boarding school. The story kept leaning slightly towards science fiction the more I thought about it.  Instead of filling the plot holes with magic I used fringe science. Eventually, it became a massive four (or five, never nailed it down) book series about clones and corporate espionage. It was awesome.

In my files I kept calling it The St. Howards Project, meaning to give it a proper name. St. Howards being the name of the school that served as my Hogwarts. When I finished writing the first book, I actually printed some copies and gave them to family and friends (thanks, Amazon). To my surprise, most of my family enjoyed it. Yeah, some of them may have sugar coated what they thought, but years later some of them even reminded me about a particularly scene they enjoyed.

But I didn’t enjoy it.

A tickle in the back of my head reminded me that, at its foundation, this was Harry Potter, and many of the themes echoed that, like “choosing between what’s right and what’s easy”. So I tore it apart. It would be the first iteration of The St. Howards Project that got tossed.

A New Story

When I started High School my writing really ramped up; by the end of 2003 I had a computer that was on a white plastic fold out table. This was a weird piece of time in the world of technology because I had a computer in my bedroom, but not my own cell phone - and cell phones were still just “cell phones” and not mini-computers for your pocket.

In August of 2003 my life changed. A fantasy book that took the world by storm came in and crashed into my lap. Eragon was written by someone who was 15. Just like me, but this kid had been lucky enough to have a family who had made their own publishing company to support his ideas and stories. On top of that he had been lucky enough to have his book picked up by someone in the industry. Paolini became my hero.

This invigorated me.

Secretly, I was most impressed with the fact that Eragon is just a manuscript for A New Hope with some words changed. “The Force” was magic, and “Jedi” were Dragon Riders. But other than those few colloquialisms, it was identical.

I don’t remember how it happened, or what exactly the plan was, but during my freshman year in high school I started writing notes here and there about a story that was similar but different enough from Pendragon, which I had fallen hard for. It was slightly more mature than MacHale’s piece and explored one of the aspects of Pendragon that I wasn’t super thrilled with: the cap of design.

Pendragon explores a cool concept of multiple dimensions that aren’t all “dimensions” in the traditional sense. Instead, some of them are just different times of the same (for example, the modern world is “Second Earth” while “First Earth” is the 1930’s), and the other dimensions are really quite simplified caricatures of worlds (one of them is a world where there is only one city and the rest of the planet is covered in water and people live on large barges or various other floatable structures).

My problem with that, at first, was that there are only 10 of these dimensions. As a freshman in high school, I was mad at this design - I thought it was too narrow and was writing yourself into a corner by limiting the number of places you could explore, the number of different things you could see or experience and the number of people you could meet.

So what I wrote was about multiple dimensions, a little bit more sci-fi than MacHale, and explored more of the “infinite possibilities” idea. I read books on String Theory, and a few different things about infinite dimensions based on choices. I made sure that the actual writing was very different from my beloved story so that I didn’t run into the same problem that my mother had pointed out previously.

I had no idea about marketing, target audience, etc. at the time but looking back it would’ve been aimed more towards adults. It took me about 7 months to finish the manuscript, and then I was stuck. I had no idea what to do so I went online to look at what others were doing and learned a little about beta readers. What I didn’t know about was the editing. So I sent it to beta readers who looked at it and either immediately quit, or sent back so many fixes that I got demoralized.

Maybe demoralized isn’t the right word, perhaps confused. I thought I had covered a lot of bases but didn’t realize how much work editing actually is part of writing. I tried many times to polish that piece of work, but eventually I put it on the shelf and moved on (I don’t remember quite how long that took me to do, because every time I tried I would fix a little bit more and a little bit more).

So, I tried again.

The second time I aimed a bit smaller and started writing a novella. I had no ambition for this one, it was going to be pure practice for me. In school we were getting deep into the Revolutionary War, so it was a fantasy-set reinterpretation of that. A Kingdom began exploring and found a colony, sent people to live there, claimed the land, etc. and eventually they rose up and claimed the colony away from the Kingdom.

I don’t think I ever finished that one because I realized I hadn’t read enough fantasy to figure out many of the nooks and crannies that genre has (and it has a lot of them). I had read Lord of the Rings and some of Chronicles of Narnia (The Magician’s Nephew and The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe I’d finished, I’d started reading The Horse and his Boy and, damn, that story is flat and boring) but that was the extent of it.

By the time I had finished my third manuscript, I was a junior in high school. My parents had started to notice this was more than just a passing fad for me, and so started talking to me about it. But I didn’t know how to talk about it. I didn’t know what it meant to be an author, or about what that entailed..

Around that time, my father took me to St. Louis for a day (a two and a half hour drive from my hometown) for a seminar. I’m pretty sure it was called the Writer’s Guild Conference, but I don’t have any paperwork or memorabilia from the event. I attended, took notes, talked to some people. I was the youngest person there (by a surprising margin) and that was a big deal. At the beginning of the conference I was brought up to the front of the podium and was introduced to every attendee, it felt like being a prize dog on display.

Don’t get me wrong, at the time it was super exciting that they were making those kinds of waves for me (it still feels nice) but I don’t think it was necessary or benefited me in any way other than slightly boosting my ego (this was countered with the embarrassment I was left with).

I’m going to breakdown the advice I received at the conference about getting published:

1. Be honest about your writing.
2. Have thick skin and learn to write alternatives on your feet when receiving feedback.
3. Learn whether you're a planner or a write-by-your-pants writer. Either works but be honest about where you fit in the spectrum.
4. Develop relationships with industry people.

Some of this might seem obvious, and number 4 might seem unfair but that’s the way the world is. People in the industry like people in the industry. This is true, though, for any industry. Breaking into an industry can be somewhat difficult, and so knowing people and having a relationship with them can be super helpful.