REELING AND WRITHING IX: COMMON SENSE RULES

REELING AND WRITHING
or,
Miss Dermark's 2015 Advent Calendar

DAY NINE

COMMON SENSE RULES
or,
TRICKS TO PUT IN AND PITFALLS TO AVOID

These tricks to put in and pitfalls to avoid come from Save the Cat!, a well-known book about screenwriting that can as well apply to storywriting...

THE TRICKS:
1) Put the Pope in the Pool: Imagine you want to write a story about an assassination plot to kill the Pope (let's say Francis, the current one). The conspirators' leader gives the details of the sting to the other plotters in the Vatican swimming pool, and there's the Pope, a septuagenarian, in a swimsuit, doing laps, unaware that the conspirators are watching him. That certainly makes the otherwise dry exposition more interesting, doesn't it? We are left to wonder if there is a public pool in the Vatican, if His Holiness is fit enough to swim, and if he can swim, after all...

What is it? Any way of distracting the audience from the fact that exposition is happening, but not so much that they don’t pay any attention at all to the exposition. Ideally involves putting the exposition into a funny or surprising context.

Good or bad thing? Definitely good.

1.5) Pull a Littlefinger: One case of PitP (Pope in the Pool) in particular, that stands apart, is so-called sexposition. Lord Baelish (at least on screen) is a master at giving us the buzz on Westerosi statescraft, and of his own agenda, while his scantily-clad employees indulge in serious fun.
2) Have your lead save a cat (it doesn't have to be a cat, after all): Why do I root for Tyrion Lannister? For the Prince and the Princess in The Snow Queen? For Desdemona? For Mana Aida, for Luna Lovegood, for Cerimon and his disciple... and for so many others? Because (among other factors) their characters are established by the good deeds they do to help others. After all, Mary Lamb said that "In the worthy Cerimon, we are instructed how goodness directed by knowledge, in bestowing benefits upon (hu)mankind, approaches to the nature of the gods." The Bard speaks himself, concerning the same character, of "the worth that learned charity aye wears." Even a person from enemy country can be helped, as illustrated by the parable of the Good Samaritan (in which a heretic public enemy dares to do what two VIPs "didn't have time for") and by films like Avatar and Pocahontas. Kindness and good faith make us sympathize with the characters who display these traits.
3) Have your lead's cat killed in front of them: Cosette's mum, whom she barely knew, is fired after defending herself from a perverted foreman and later on dies of consumption. So do many other parents across literature, as well as mentors -Obi-Wan, Sirius Black, the list goes on-. Enjolras and nearly all of his followers are mowed down, leaving Marius as the broken sole survivor. But a good "killing the cat" cannot only be the surreptitious summoning of the Plot Reaper to have a likeable character cease to be (whether fall terminally ill, pull a "none shall pass!", take the bullet, drink the hemlock, fall upon the battlefield, get stuffed into the refrigerator...), but also, for instance, betrayal at the hands of friends and/or significant others. Edmond Dantès would never have become the Count if he hadn't suffered those serious stabs in the back. Neither would Iago have schemed to ruin the Cypriot elite or Cassio asked Desdemona to be his advocate (after getting stabbed in the back by Iago, in fact, his master plan constantly involves backstabbing others as payment for what he sees as getting backstabbed). Ebenezer Scrooge, Severus Snape, and many other characters saw their respective significant others get away and hook up with another person.

THE PITFALLS:
1) Double mumbo jumbo: putting two pieces of starkly different phlebotinum in the same story. Like space aliens and pixie dust, or space aliens and vampires/werewolves/undead, or gods and mad science. Blake, in Save the Cat, says it's terrible. But I have some things to object.
The Snow Queen pretty much runs on both ice magic and the power of the heart (a pure, warm heart makes you an omnivoxa [able to speak fluent animal, plant, and even star] and allows you to summon a whole army of warriors with a song or a prayer in your darkest hour; while a frozen heart turns you into an arrogant, callous, and completely indifferent mathematical prodigy), and it's a great story. Pixie dust could be combined with nanites and/or powdered space crystals. Westeros has got (get ready for the catalogue!): dragons, Pleistocene fauna (direwolves, mammoths...), ice magic (including undead), fire magic with religious overtones (from the 'verse's counterpart of Christianity, no less), prophecies, visions, elves (the "Children of the Forests"), possession, mad science, you name it. And it all goes down smoothly, since many of these various items overlap with one another...
2) Laying too much pipe: Two simple rules for exposition: 1) Show, don't tell (this works good in graphic media). 2) Put the Pope in the Pool. But there are other ways, such as the History and Lore segments of GoT, which cover facts on Westeros not seen in the main TV series. Or songs, especially villain songs and recitatives, in musical films. A lot of the pipe in the Ringstetten Saga was laid out as tie-in Easter eggs in the annotations, specifically patterned after History and Lore. So I could lay enough pipe and balance it with the action. Within the action itself, the backstory of Katia's parentage was revealed within a song, a recitative, just like Emily's backstory in Corpse Bride (the inspiration came from there). Many songs, especially those sung by villainous characters like the Thénardiers, like Scar, or like Gothel in Tangled, not to mention Iago's Creed (and his other numbers, too) in Verdi's Otello opera, give away a lot of information about the characters' agenda.
3) Too much marzipan: means getting stuck on a good idea and overusing it such that the repetition destroys its effectiveness, trying to squeeze as much as possible into a premise. Keep it simple. The blurb must be a one-liner. What's the one-liner? To begin with, here are the one-liners for my favourite plots:
For Persephone: a daughter is spirited away and married to her captor, while her mother seeks her desperately. For Romeo and Juliet: the young heirs to enemy clans fall madly in love and marry in secret. For The Snow Queen: a plucky girl goes forth to seek and free her friend, frozen-hearted and enslaved by a dark force. For A Christmas Carol: a cold and lonely curmudgeon has a change of heart for the better, thanks to four ghosts and some time travel. For Les Misérables: a once exploited orphan girl makes her way through life with her saviour and adoptive grandfather, a reformed convict still pursued by authorities, who keeps his past a secret from her. For Go!Princess Precure: a dethroned crown prince, his sister, and their friends struggle to free their occupied kingdom. For Othello: A great general, once an outsider, believes that his beloved wife is unfaithful, and his sanity slips, due to his advisor's deception. For the Tale of the Three Brothers: two of the titular brothers make foolish wishes and die untimely deaths, while the third one, who makes a sensible wish, dies at a ripe old age.
Now on to the one-liners of my own fiction:
For the Ringstetten Saga: Swedish history retold as a homage to nineteenth-century historical fiction. For Pleasure Past and Anguish Past: The Snow Queen set in our days with a colourful cast. For the Baratheon Saga: The Baratheons, their friends, and their foes in Imperial Prussia, providing a close-in look at the European wealthy of the Progressive Era. For The Stars' Tears: a different, unorthodox premise for a trio of magical warriors. For The Tale of the Three Baratheon Brothers: the age-old tale of the Peverells starring the Baratheons. For The Queen Beyond the Wall: The Snow Queen in Westeros, starring Jaime and Brienne. For Kétkedésvár: Othello as a thriller in a Hungarian fortress in the nineteenth century. The list goes on...
4) Watch out for that glacier! This is when danger closes in way too slowly. In Westeros, five books and as many seasons have been released so far, and the kingdom has not been invaded yet by Dany's army or that of the White Walkers. Yet. It takes Martin years to write novels and screenplays, but at least we have all the courtly intrigue and all the action to keep us amused until the glaciers (Dany and the Walkers) finally arrive. In the Ringstetten Saga, the 30YW is raging all around when the story begins, and we are pulled into it right when the war gets the most exciting. In Othello, Iago makes his first move (inebriating his commanding officer to make him seem unworthy of his rank) already during the victory revels at the start. Elsa's ice powers, in Frozen, manifest and endanger her sister's life... already in their childhood. In Les Misérables (the musical and the French TV series), we get right off the bat that Valjean is a reformed convict still mistrusted by authorities and that Cosette is an abused, exploited orphan who needs someone to free her from the Thénardiers. Both Kai and Jaime Lannister get rammed by shards of magic mirror right when their characters are established, and their PP&AP counterpart Étienne is drugged with "sugar" for the first time in the same situation. In The Grand Budapest Hotel, Madame D. is poisoned with strychnine right after bequeathing her favourite painting to Gustave, right when we had laid out all the pipe with our suave hero, his sidekick Zero, third lead Agatha, the military, and Madame D.'s Death Eater-like, homophobic, ambitious children. If there is a glacier, an impending peril that closes in too slowly, keep the folks across the fourth wall at least entertained, take a lesson from George R.R.
5) The Covenant of the Arc: The Covenant of the Arc requires every character, except the deceased ones and the bad people (with exceptions), must have an arc, or be changed by the experience of the story. The whole leading roster (except the deceased ones and perchance the villain/s who cannot be redeemed) will have changed and developed at the end of the arc. In The Queen Beyond the Wall, nearly the whole ensemble cast, Tywin Lannister included, is touched by Brienne's quest. Renly is dead, the Tyrells in mourning (Loras furious, Margaery desperate), Bran training greensight, Jojen in a coma and Meera worried about him, Jaime finally freed from the mirror shard but also losing his right hand, Brienne has realized that her quest has cost loved ones their lives and their happiness, and Tywin has finally seen the worth in having Brienne for a daughter-in-law. Even Qyburn has begun to let go of his blind faith in science. In Les Mis, every survivor of the Revolution has changed, except maybe the Thénardiers, who, in spite of having become a baron and a baroness, are still up to their same old tricks. In Frozen, Anna, Elsa, and Kristoff all learn valuable lessons about how to interact with others. At the end of Othello (same goes for my versions of the story, like Kétkedésvár, Die Upon a Kiss, and still unfinished My Fair Warrior), only one leading character survives, the once innocent young lieutenant, now disabled and bereft of all his loved ones: his life will never be the same. Rapunzel, Eugene, the royals, and the thugs in Tangled all change, as do the leading characters in every Ringstetten arc. And the whole living cast of the Westerosverse is developing in such a great way that only Martin could have written it, which carries on to the Baratheon Saga, which also abides by the Covenant (Sandra Stark and the Tyrell children taking a darker turn with the Great War, and the von Lännisters in decadence). And I promise you, readers, that Pleasure Past and Anguish Past will also abide by the Covenant.