Category Archives: Writing Journal

Writing Journal: Best Laid Outlines

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Eijo: Alrighty, we’ve finally completed the new script’s outline and now we’re writing actual pages. Whew! Finally getting into the nitty-gritty of a scene, watching the characters play it all out, seeing how well things go. Were our plans right on the money? Or completely off-the-mark?

Really, an outline is just a theory of how a story could go, but you never find out if it’s actually gonna work until you’re writing out the scene — that’s when all the practical issues come up.

It’s too easy to write in outline form: “Taiheed snaps off pictures of the maniacs, learns clues about their ‘society.’” But then you’re sitting there, hands hovering over the keyboard, eyes locked on a blank screen, and suddenly the question arises: “What kinda ‘society’ are these maniacs supposed to have? What were we thinking!”

So I guess an outline could also be considered a set of goals for the story too, then. It’s the little workshop where you dream big before you have to get to work honing those big dreams until they make some amount of sense within the context of your story.

Just looking over our last script’s outline here, I see such pie-in-the-sky (and painfully vague) scene descriptions as “maniac attack!” and “endgame” and the poetically apt “clusterf**k.” At that planning stage, we don’t have a dang clue exactly how a maniac attack plays out, but we know it’ll be awesome. Anyway, that’s a plan and it puts The Schube and I in the often difficult position of writing a maniac attack only to have it come out as most certainly un-awesome. That’s what second drafts are for. And third and fourth and fifth…

So that’s where we are now. Turning our best laid plans into fully realized scenes — it’s a heady time, and more than a little intimidating because we’re really excited about the cleverly ghoulish things we’ve got planned for this one. Now we’ll find out if we’ve got the chops to make it work.

Song of the day comes from Little Dragon — I cannot stop listening to their song “Feather.” It keeps me going when the scene ain’t workin’. There’s something darkly cinematic about their style, and Yukimi Nagano’s voice rocks my world. Enjoy.

Writing Journal: Hold That Tent Up!

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Eijo: A few weeks into the new script and we’re rumblin’ along. We’ve got our beginning and our ending, as well as some bits n’ pieces of the middle (not yet in any logical order). And we’ve been taking the time to get our tentpoles in order. This has become one of the more useful steps in our process.

See, we noticed that too many genre films (be they horror or action or sci-fi or whatever) forget to put in the GOOD parts. Have you ever slogged through a bad monster movie where annoying characters spout crappy dialogue for what seems like hours, and finally thrown up your hands and shouted at the screen, “Someone show up and start killing these idiots!” …or is it just us?

There are several action movies I could name where very little action ever occurs, and it always amazes me how that even happens. I think about a pure genre film like a musical… imagine going to see a musical and waiting 90 minutes before seeing a single song n’ dance number? That would never fly in a million years, but strangely there are other kinds of movies that apparently forget to include the stuff the audience paid their tickets to see.

Looking to combat that sorta shoddy work (horror by and large ain’t literature, but it should at least deliver on the scaring and the maiming and slaughtery whatsits), we make sure to set aside some time and work on the tentpoles — the scenes or events that hold up the entire structure, the bits we’re always either building toward or coming down from. This part is always a blast because we put all story aside for the moment and just dream up the craziest stuff we can — scenes that work as well outside a context as within. During this period, absolutely anything goes. We dream big. Then we start honing the best ideas, testing them out, seeing if they fit comfortably within the script’s structure — if they fit the puzzle and continue to entertain us, then they go in the script.

Getting the perfect number of tentpoles depends on the story being written. Don’t want too many or they start cancelling each other out. Too few and the script suffers from dead zones where nothing of much interest occurs (commonly known as Act 2 in a lotta crappy scripts).

Our script Asylum has seven tentpoles — they aren’t all necessarily the kill scenes, but rather anything that’s a pay-off. It could be a character beat, or the perfectly positioned bit of gallows humor that offsets the violence around it. It can be a full scene or a tiny moment. But no matter what it is, it ensures our script keeps bounding forward without getting lost up its own tuchus in the intricacies of a rambling directionless plot.

The audience wants what the audience wants — whether it’s show-stopping musical numbers or bloody good ax murderin’s — and it’s our job to give it to ‘em. A job, by the by, we love to do.

Alright, today’s song is “Lady Bones” by Magneta Lane. Love this band. The video gets really cool toward the end when they’re performing in some awesome Dia de los Muertos makeup. By the way, that’s coming up on the 2nd, people — get your skull cookies ready!

Writing Journal: That New Project Smell

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Eijo: Me and The Schube have started work on a new project and we’re deep into that awesome part of the process where everything’s so new and there’s unlimited potential to do cool things. It’s a heady time. Soon enough, we’ll be in the weeds without any idea how to make it through to “the end” with our sanity and, more importantly, our story intact — but for now, it’s all good!

We start with a rough idea of what we want to write — several ideas, in fact (we chose this project out of 15 candidates), and then put it through the ol’ mental ringer. What is it about the concept that excites us? What’s our fresh take on the subject matter? Then we ask what I think is a pretty important question — what do we NOT want to see? What’s played out, boring, unoriginal, or just plain dumb?

We’re not, by nature, melancholic writers who gotta suffer for our work so our philosophy is best summed up as “fun.” We like to write scripts that people can enjoy, so we’ve got this feeling like: if we’re having a good time writing it, then hopefully that’ll translate to folks having a good time watching it.

So, yeah. It’s all good right now. After three days of heavy brainstorms, we’re starting on the early outline, getting a peek at the rough shape of the script. Lookin’ good! (Watch this space for the turn of the tide when all hope is lost and keyboards are mercilessly abused by foreheads.)

The song of the day is “Barton Hollow” by The Civil Wars. Holy crap I love this tune!

Writing Journal: Lost… and then Found Again

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words written so far: 800

Eijo: If I get 1,200 words down in a day then I feel pretty good about life, so I’ve got a little way to go yet. Maybe I’ll catch a second wind and bust out 1,600 or even 2,000 in all (before I fall into a stupor of salty snack foods and late-night tv) — it’s happened before, by god. I mark those days on my desk calender.

Made an odd discovery the other day. I’d been working on a medieval gangster story for several months, but I couldn’t get Chapter 1 right. I’d work the outline then break off and write the prose blind, which never goes well because without an outline I tend to wander off into nonsense territory where robots show up for no good reason, or the main character abandons the plotline in order to take an unplanned roadtrip down to Saragosa for some Mexican sushi and a movie. Then I’d scratch the whole dang thing and start again with a new outline, maybe jot down some random notes or bits of dialogue, anything to get me unstuck.

I wrote the Chapter 1 five times, but no matter what I did I couldn’t get it to sing. So I tried one… more… time. Got a page in then threw up my hands, cursed the story gods, and walked away.

For the past month, I’ve focused on my detective story co-starring Satan (or a guy who smells a lot like him) — but by chance I picked up my medieval gangster notebook and flipped it open. Read the single page I’d written in that sixth iteration of Chapter 1 and BLAM! It was good! What the crap? I’d finally figured out how to tackle the opening and then I just walked away? What the heck was wrong with me?

So I sat right down and picked up where I left off. Now Chapter 1 is chuggin’ along and I’m feeling pretty good. But where does that leave the detective story? I dunno, maybe I’ll pick it up again in a month and say, “Why did I stop writing this!” I’ve never been good at focusing on one thing.

Today’s song is PJ Harvey’s “In the Dark Places” — every song on her latest album, Let England Shake, is an instant classic but this tune’s the one that gets me movin’ while I’m trying to sweat a few more words onto the page.