writing the heart of your story (24 page)

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Lakin lives in a small town south of San Francisco, CA, with her husband Lee, a gigantic lab named Coaltrane, and three persnickety cats. She loves to hike and backpack, cook, and spend time with her two daughters and grandson.

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Want to become the best novelist you can be?

The Writer’s Toolbox series will give you all the tools you need to write terrific, well-structured stories that will stand the test of time and scrutiny.

If you benefited from
Writing the Heart of Your Story
, be sure to get
Shoot Your Novel
—an essential writing craft guide that will teach you the art of “show don’t tell” using time-tested cinematic technique. In this era of visual media, readers want more than ever to “see” stories unfold before their eyes. By utilizing film technique and adapting the various camera shots into your fiction, your writing will undergo a stunning transformation from “telling” to “showing.”

Here’s a sneak peek at
Shoot Your Novel
, releasing fall, 2014:

Shoot Your Novel

Cinematic Techniques to Supercharge Your Writing

INTRODUCTION

POINT AND SHOOT

So, a man walks into a bar, accompanied by a large piece of asphalt. He goes up to the bartender and says, “I’ll have a whiskey.” He nods at his friend and adds, “Oh, and one for the road.”

If I told this joke to you and a group of your friends, I’m not sure you’d laugh as much as I’d hope, but one thing I am sure of—you would each have pictured this playing out in your head, and each would have seen a completely different “movie.” Maybe you pictured this taking place in a Western saloon, with the man dressed in cowboy boots and wearing a Stetson hat. He probably had a Texan drawl, and maybe was chewing tobacco as he spoke. Maybe one of your friends imagined a Yuppie high-end urban bar, with soft leather upholstery and smelling of expensive Cuban cigar smoke.

However you envisioned this briefly described scene, no doubt your friends “saw” something wholly different in their minds. Here’s the point: if you had watched this in a movie on the big screen, you and your friends would have seen the exact same things. You wouldn’t be arguing later whether the piece of asphalt was black or gray or the man was wearing that hat or not. The film itself provided all the details for you, leaving little to your imagination.

Tell It Like You See It

With fiction, though, writers are presented with an entirely different situation. The reader reading your novel will only see the specifics if you detail them. And even if you do, it’s likely she will still envision many of the scene elements different from what you hoped to convey.

That’s not necessarily a bad thing. In fact, leaving out details and allowing the reader to “fill in the blanks” is part of the reader-writer relationship. In a way, a novel becomes much more personal than a movie, a little bit of a “choose your own adventure” quality. Many love novels just for that ability to “put themselves” into the story, whether it be by relating to a protagonist, seeing people we know in the characters presented, or feeling like we are going through the trials and perils presented by the plot.

The challenge and beauty of the artistic palette a writer uses raises numerous questions:

* How much or how little detail do I (or should I) put in my novel in order to help the reader see the story the way I see it? And how much should I leave to the reader’s imagination?

* How can I best write each scene so that I “show” the reader what I want him to see?

* How can I write scenes that will give the emotional impact equivalent to what can be conveyed through a film?

The joke I told was short and didn’t give much detail. It had no power or punch, no strong feel of action or movement. I doubt you will remember it a month from now. Other than the man walking and talking and nodding, the “scene” was stagnant, with little to stir the imagination or evoke emotion. Maybe your own writing feels this way to you—often—and you don’t know what to do to make it better. Maybe you’ve read a dozen books on the writing craft and have attended countless workshops at writers’ conferences and you still can’t seem to “get” how to write powerful, evocative scenes that move your readers. Well, if you sometimes feel like strangling, stabbing, or decapitating your novel because of flat, boring, lackluster scenes, you can shoot your novel instead!

Show, Don’t Tell—But How?

Sol Stein, in his book
Stein on Writing
, says, “Twentieth-century readers, transformed by film and TV, are used to seeing stories. The reading experience for a twentieth-century reader is increasingly visual. The story is happening in front of his eyes.” This is even more true in the twenty-first century. As literary agent and author Donald Maass says in
Writing 21st Century Fiction
: “Make characters do something that readers can visualize.”

We’ve heard it countless times: show, don’t tell. Sounds simple, right? Wrong. There are a myriad of choices a writer has to make in order to “show” and not “tell” a scene. Writers are often told they need to show, which in essence means to create visual scenes the reader can “watch” unfold as they read.

But telling a writer to “show” is vague. Just how do you show? How do you transfer the clearly enacted scene playing in your mind to the page in a way that not only gets the reader to see just what you want her to see but also comes across with the emotional impact you intend?

The Shotgun Method

Writers know that if they say “Jane was terrified,” that only tells the reader what Jane is feeling; it doesn’t show her terrified. So they go on to construct a scene that shows Jane in action and reacting to the thing that inspires fear in her. And somehow in doing so writers hope they will make their reader afraid too. But that’s often like using a shotgun approach. You aim at a target from a hundred yards away with a shotgun and hope a few buckshot pellets actually hit the bull’s eye. Many writers think if they just “point and shoot” they will hit their target every time. But then, when they get lackluster reviews, or dozens of agent or publisher rejections, they can’t figure out what they did wrong, or failed to do. Why is this? Is there some “secret formula” to writing visually impacting scenes every time?

No, not secret. In fact, the method is staring writers in the face; we have all been raised watching thousands of movies and television shows. The style, technique, and methods used in film and TV are so familiar to us, we process them comfortably and even subconsciously. We now expect these elements to appear in the novels we read, to some degree—if not consciously then subconsciously.

Filmmaker Gustav Mercado, in his book
The Filmmaker’s Eye
, makes this very observation about movies, stating that cinematic tradition has become standardized in the way the rules of composition are applied to certain camera shots “which over time have linked key moments in a story with the use of particular shots.” His “novel” approach, which he claims is new, is to examine the shot as “a deeper and discursive exploration into the fundamental elements of the visual language of cinema.” If this has been proven true with camera technique, it stands to reason the same idea would transfer over into writing fiction. If novelists can learn how filmmakers utilize particular camera shots to achieve specific effects, create specific moods, and evoke specific emotions, they have a powerful tool at hand.

We know what makes a great, riveting scene in a movie, and what makes a boring one—at least viscerally. And though our tastes differ, certainly, for the most part we often agree when a scene “works” or doesn’t. It either accomplishes what the writer or director has set out to do, or it flops.

So since we have all been (over)exposed to film and its visual way of storytelling, and its influence on society has altered the tastes of fiction readers, it’s only logical to take a look at what makes a great movie. Note that we’re not looking at plot or premise in this book, for that’s an entirely different subject. Instead, we’re going to deconstruct movie technique into bite-sized pieces.

Just as your novel comprises a string of scenes that flow together to tell your whole story, so too with movies and television shows. However, you, the novelist, lay out your scenes much differently from the way a screenwriter does. Whereas you might see each of your scenes as integrated, encapsulated moments of time, a movie director sees each scene as a compilation of a number of segments or pieces—a collection of camera shots that are subsequently edited and fit together to create that seamless “moment of time.”

Time to Put On a New Hat

So take off your writer hat for a minute and put on a director one—you know, that sun visor you see the director wear as he’s looking through the camera eyepiece on the outdoor set of the big studio lot and as he thinks how he’s going to shoot the next scene. Have you ever watched a behind-the-scenes look at how a movie is being filmed, or a TV series? I love watching and listening to Peter Jackson in his many videos detailing the filming of both
The Lord of the Rings
and
The Hobbit
feature films. Jackson does a wonderful job showing the kinds of decisions he has to make as he ponders the shooting of a scene in order to get across the impact, mood, details, and key moments he desires in the final cut.

Directors have to plan like this. They can’t show up on the set each morning and look at the shooting schedule and just “wing it.” A large sum of money is riding on the director doing his homework and knowing exactly what each scene must convey and show to the viewer. Directors decide just how a scene will be shown and what specifically will be focused on. Using the camera, a director can basically “force” viewers to see exactly what he wants them to see. And one goal in doing this is to evoke a particular emotional reaction from them.

Writing Is Not All That Different from Directing

Writers can do the same. They may not be able to paint so specific a picture that every single reader will envision a novel exactly the same—and that’s a good thing. In fact, that’s what makes reading novels so . . . well, novel. Readers infuse their personalities, backgrounds, fears, and dreams into a book as they read. A character named Tiffany will conjure up a face for me different from the one you picture in your head. In this way, novels are an interactive experience—the reader’s imagination interacting with the novelist’s.

Yet, writers can also put on their director’s hat—and well they should. Remember, readers nowadays want to read books that are more visual, as Stein remarked—scenes that are happening right before their eyes. But few writers are ever shown just how to do this effectively, and that’s what this book is about. You don’t have to guess anymore how to “show” a scene in a way that’s “supercharged.” By learning to use camera shots the way a director does, you too can take readers where you want them to go, make them see what you want them to see. Don’t leave that up to the reader to decide. Be not just the writer but the director. Filmmaker Gustav Mercado makes a succinct point in his book: “You should not be subservient to the dictates of a technique but make the technique work for the specific needs of your story instead.” What a great truth for both novelists and filmmakers.

So get out of your cozy office chair and follow me onto the set where all the great movies are filmed. Get out your writers’ toolbox and be prepared to add a whole new layer of tools—camera shots. Once you learn what these are and how to use them in writing fiction, it’s more than likely you will never write the same way again—or look at a scene the same way.

And I truly hope so. I hope once you grab these cinematic secrets and supercharge your novel, you will never take that shotgun out again and just “point and shoot.” Instead, you will be the director looking at the scene from all angles and making deliberate decisions on which camera angles to use for the greatest impact.

CHAPTER 1: IT’S ALL ABOUT THE ANGLE

Having spent my entire childhood at the feet of my screenwriter mother, I read more TV scripts than books while growing up, as there were piles of them around my mother’s office, and I’d often curl up on the couch and read one after school. I also spent many hours on sound stages and on location watching many of her TV episodes being filmed. Okay, I will confess I liked to sit in Peggy Lipton’s chair during the shooting of
Mod Squad
, and if we were outside I wore my mirror shades to be in sync with the dynamic threesome I admired (I rarely saw Clarence Williams III ever take his shades off—indoors or outdoors). I spent many hours wandering in and out of sound stages at Fox, MGM, and other studios where my mother, for a time, had an office. I’d sneak into
M.A.S.H
and watch the banter Alan Alda tossed around as he operated on a fake body in the surgery tent, or mosey on over to
Battlestar Gallactica
. I had fun going on location and even spent a week in San Francisco on the set with Rock Hudson (
MacMillan and Wife
), since my stepfather was the director of that episode, and got to watch some cool stunts involving cable cars (no, Rock didn’t do his own stunts!).