Can an app have the same impact as a horror movie? Neal
Edelstein thinks so. He’s produced a number of traditional movies but his
latest venture is a ghost story app (Apple only) called “Haunting Melissa.”
You can download the first chapter free. If you inform your social media contacts that you watched the first episode, the second one is free as well.
After that you pay,
but you won’t know exactly when the next chapter will arrive. You can buy individual
episodes for 99 cents or $1.99 for HD, or a “season pass” for $6.99/$14.99HD.
The production cost just under $1 million and was written by
Andrew Klaven (“True Crime”). The money came from an unidentified angel
investor who is already prepared to bankroll a sequel.
Movies tend to have a big marketing
budget, but “Haunting Melissa” will depend on word of mouth and mentions on
social media. If it works, it could kick off a whole new format.
Want to make huge progress on a writing project (or on getting your home office organized, or anything else)? Join my online Massive Action Day on Sunday, June 16.
Declare your goal for the day in our exclusive chat window and update throughout the day. You'll get support from me and the other particpants and I do a brief live video broadcast every hour with tips and to answer your questions on how to get more done.
It's only £5 (about $7.70 or €6) when you sign up for the series of ten. Get all the information here: MASSIVE ACTION DAY INFO.
"I love the MADs - they are always fun and I get
things done...I find it fun and productive.
Working in the MAD chat is like having an exercise buddy - you can exercise
alone, but you'll probably exercise more and have more fun when having a buddy!" -- Susanne Tanner, Zurich, Switzerland
Vanity Fair’s June issue reveals the many troubles of the
film “World War Z.” They include:
an unfinished script at the start of production
a budget that went out of control (ending up
somewhere in the neighborhood of $200 million—and as the old joke goes, that’s
a pretty expensive neighborhood!)
an ending that didn’t make sense and required
re-shooting 40 minutes worth of material
throwing away twelve minutes of already-shot
battle scenes
In the article, screenwriter Damon Lindelof says after it
was obvious the director’s cut didn’t work he said, “Is there material
that can be written to make that stuff work better? To have it make sense? To
have it have emotional stakes? And plot logic and all that?”
OK, so it didn’t make sense, the plot wasn’t logical, the story didn’t have significant emotional stakes. Hmm, you’d think somebody might have
noticed that earlier in the process.
Why would you start shooting a movie before you were
happy with the script?
How was it that after the production finished shooting in
Malta, somebody discovered a drawer full of unpaid invoices totalling millions?
Wasn’t anybody in charge?
Answers on a postcard, please.
The film stars Brad Pitt and is about a zombie pandemic. It
could be interesting, but I suspect a film about how everything went wrong on
the production could be even more interesting.
The three-act structure of films and stories applies to real life, too. Yesterday's cartoon was a glimpse of one man's Act I, today it's Act II, which often features a reversal of some kind in the middle.
(Want friendly guidance for writing your book? Get "Your Writing Coach," published by Nicholas Brealey and available from Amazon or your other favorite bookseller.)
Screenwriters and others probably are familiar with "3 act structure" - the way many stories are organized (the story kicks in with an inciting incident in act 1, escalates with lots of conflicts in act 2 (often with a reversal of some kind in the middle) and resolves in act 3. Really it's another way of saying beginning, middle, and end. We can look at our lives in the same way, which is what led to this little series of cartoons. Today: Act I.
(for guidance on writing your book, get a copy of "Your Writing Coach," published by Nicholas Brealey and available from Amazon or your other favorite bookseller.)
The inner critic is the part of you that can be harshly
critical when you start something new or when you get stuck. In my book, “Your
Writing Coach,” I suggest some
ways to get rid of it, and right now I have an additional one. I call this one
THE BLOW-UP METHOD.
It’s really simple: Just listen to the negative statements
or thoughts and exaggerate each one, step by step, with each step being worse
than the last.
Example: You’re about to start writing or maybe about to
start sending you your manuscript. Your Inner Critic tells you, “You’re wasting
your time. Nobody will like it or want it.”
Now start exaggerating possible responses:
“Not only will nobody want it, their rejection letters will
insult you.”
“Not only will they insult you, they will hire a billboard
to tell the world how bad a
writer you are.”
“Not only will they hire a billboard, they’ll take out prime
time television ads to humiliate you.”
“Not only will you be humiliated on prime-time television,
you will be deported and never allowed to return.”
“Not only will you be deported, no country will take you in
and you’ll spend the rest of your life on a small island in the middle of the
ocean.”
“Even a small island in the middle of the ocean won’t want
you; you and your manuscript will be shot into outer space.”
I know that’s silly, but the point is that it’s easy to lose
our sense of humor when we really want something to succeed. This little
exercise brings back some perspective and some humour to help you avoid being
dominated by the inner critic. It’s fast and it’s fun, so if and when your
inner critic shows up, give it a try.
***
You'll find lots of additional innovative ways to overcome blocks, be more productive, and write well in my book, "Your Creative Writing Masterclass." It features writing advice from some of the greatest writers of all time. It's published by Nicholas Brealey and you can get it from Amazon or your other favorite bookseller.
Readers and movie-goers like big stories. That
doesn’t mean only stories in which the world is going to be destroyed by aliens
or international terrorist rings try to bring down the Western world.
It can be a story about the
effect of a divorce on a child but even when the event is small we want to see
the big impact. In one case it’s the impact on the planet, in the other it’s
the impact on a child.
If you tend to make your stories too small, or in the case
of screenplays not visual enough, you can use the BLOW-UP METHOD (blow-up as in inflate, not explode).
It means pushing a particular incident as far as you can,
far beyond what is sensible. By expanding the boundaries that far, you can then
cut back and still end up with a choice that has more impact than the one you started with.
I’ll give you an example. In a script I’m working on, I have a father who owns a company, and his grown son, his second-in-command. The son expects the father to retire and then the son will finally run the company. In the first draft I have a scene in
their boardroom where the father announces he’s changed his mind. He’s not going
to retire any time soon.
This is a feature film, and the scene seemed too
small. The problem was mainly the setting—it’s hard to make a scene in a board
room very visually interesting. I also wanted to make the son’s humiliation
bigger.
I blew it up to the biggest example I could think of: the father
pushes aside the Pope on the balcony of the Vatican and announces it to a crowd
of half a million people. Or he
goes on a national television show and announces it.
Of course those are not workable, but it got me to thinking:
where could he logically announce it, where there are lots of people?
The idea
that came up was a big trade show for their industry, which happens to be
greeting cards. The father is speaking to a big crowd of people, everybody knows
it’s supposed to be his fond farewell, and instead he announces he isn’t
handing the company over to his son. Bigger, more humiliating, and visually
more interesting.
The key with this method is not to be afraid to expand your
mind by taking the situation to ridiculous extremes before you cut back to
something that actually works.
If you have a big writing (or other) project, one great way to build momentum is to spend a full day working on it with support from your peers.
IT'S GOOD TO GO MAD
That's what we do on my monthly MADs--Massive Action Days. It's all online. You sign in to our exclusive website, declare your goal for the day there, and get to work. Every hour I do a brief live video broadcast to answer questions and offer tips. You update us on your progress and everybody supports each other.
The people already doing the MADs find it incredibly productive and it's inexpensive--only £5 each when you sign up for ten. You can find our more at www.MassiveActionDay.com.
What else can you do to build momentum? Let's start with the basics:
The formula is Velocity x Mass = Momentum
The more you apply effort, the more momentum you get, unless
you encounter another important aspect of momentum, Resistance. Resistance can increase the mass of a molehill to that of a mountain.
FOUR POINTS OF RESISTANCE
In writing there are four points at which you
tend to have resistance:
1: Getting started. The best solution is chunking down the goal into manageable chunks, scheduling
regular time to work, and getting support.
2: The middle. You’ve done a lot but there’s a lot yet to do
and the initial excitement has worn off. The best tools are: knowing this is
normal, using a variety of brainstorming techniques (like the ones in my
writing books) to get a fresh perspective, and making sure your Inner Critic
doesn’t talk you into quitting.
3: After the first draft. The first step when you're ready to critique your first draft is to use methods for getting a more objective view of your own writing
(wait a week, change location and posture, print it out on different colour
paper and/or a different typeface, read once for general reactions and don’t
try to fix it as you go—note the necessary changes, then go back into creative
mode, at your usual writing location).
When it’s as good as you can make it, show to someone you trust to be constructive. Tell them you want them to jot down any problems
they discern—where it’s boring, where it’s confusing, where they think what’s
happening isn’t plausible, etc. Tell them you don’t want them to suggest
solutions, only problems.
Fix the problems and repeat, but stop rewriting when the new version isn’t getting better, just different.
4: When you send it out into the world. Put on your business hat, not your
sensitive artist hat, and make a plan. Let your sensitive artist get busy
on a new creative project so it doesn’t hang around getting tense.
>> In the next post we'll see how you can also build momentum for every working session.
(Want to get more things done, more easily? Using creative methods rather than more hard work? You'll find the ansswers in my book, "Focus: use the power of targeted thinking to get more done." It's published by Pearson and you can get it from Amazon or your other favorite bookseller.)
A member of my Raindance workshop emailed me to ask whether
I could recommend any ways to get over being too close to one’s own work to see
its faults.
The most useful approach is to treat the draft as though it
had been written by someone else and they’d asked you for constructive
criticism. The ways you can get that distance include:
Print the draft in a different font and/or on
different color paper (pale yellow is good—easy on the eyes);
Read the draft in a different room (or a
different place altogether) than the one in which you created it;
Sit back as you read the draft—this is the
critical posture, whereas leaning forward tends to be the creative posture
(which is why most of us writers have terrible posture);
Note the problems you see with it, but resist
the temptation to come up with solutions at this point. That will be part of
the creative process.
Experiment with the time of day that seems to
work best for you in terms of making constructive criticism. I find in the first hour or so after waking up, my creative juices aren’t flowing but my
critical faculties are. The opposite may be true for you—experiment to determine this for yourself.
(Did you know that Charles Dickens, Mark Twain, Jane Austen, Ernest Hemingway, and many other great authors left behind excellent advice for aspiring writers? I've collected it and suggested how you can apply it to your own writing--all in the book, Your Creative Writing Masterclass. You can get it from Amazon or your other favorite book seller.)
In a post on the Raindance site, Stephanie Joalland included
a rewriting tip that I also advocate and that most screenwriters and novelists
resist: before you start on your second draft, write a new outline of your
first draft.
Why do writers not want to do this? Well, it’s extra work
and they feel that they’ve gone past this stage. Sure, probably they made
changes to their original outline (I’m assuming there was one), but they don’t
seem big enough to warrant re-doing the outline.
That's often wrong because some of those changes may have derailed the logic of
your storyline, or started strands that you didn’t pay off, or involved
incidents that you didn’t set up early enough. By this point you will have been
wrapped up in this story long enough that you can’t see the forest for the
trees.
An outline forces you to step back and look at the major
events of the story. With that in hand you can ask yourself some painful but
necessary questions:
Does every step of this story makes sense?
Is
there a clear cause and effect sequence?
Are there at least one or two surprises for the reader?
Are there “orphan” scenes that should either be
cut or integrated better?
Is the overall flow of the conflict escalating?
Have you chosen actions and settings that reveal character as well as advancing the plot?
The answers to those questions will make rewriting the second draft much easier.
In the next post I’ll suggest some ways you can get the
necessary distance from your own work to be able to critique it more
objectively.
(Do you want friendly guidance for writing your own book? Get a copy of Your Writing Coach, published by Nicholas Brealey and available from Amazon or your other favorite book seller.)
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