Time to Write

How to Write Funny

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Here's a link to a one-minute animation and an article I wrote for the Raindance Film Festival site on how to write funny:

http://www.raindance.org/site/how-to-write-funny

If you want to write better descriptions, try this

One of my challenges in writing prose is handling descriptions. I've written scripts mostly, and in those you are very concise: 

INT. COURTROOM - DAY

A typical courtroom, packed with members of the press and as many onlookers as it can hold. In the front row, the relatives of the victim sit together, stone-faced.

And that's about it. If the relatives have speaking parts, I would describe them very briefly when they first speak, but again it would be just a few words.

In a novel, you won't get far writing just "She entered a typical courtroom." Even though the trend is toward less description these days, you need to pick out a few details to make the setting and the people come alive. 

One method I've found useful is drawing. 

Drawing forces you to observe. 

If you're drawing a person, you notice the chunky shoes that lady is wearing, that this man's shirt isn't tucked in at the back, or that this young waitress has the top of a tattoo peeking out above the neck of her blouse. 

If you draw the coffee shop, you notice that the water jug is cracked, the chalkboard on which someone has a written the word muffins with one f, and there are lots of slices of carrot cake left in the display case but not many chocolate ones.

You don't have to be good at drawing and you don't have to show the results to anyone. The point of doing it is doing it.

If you are really drawing-phobic, you can even just jot down the details you would draw if you were going to draw.

It's also not about using the specifics you see, it's about training ourselves to see them in the first place. 

Give it a try, it's fun.

(You'll find lots more tips in my book, "Your Writing Coach"--which also makes a great present! You can get it from Amazon and other book sellers.)

 

What can this project tell us about ebooks, original web content, and interactivity?

If you are interested in ebooks, video on the web,and the question of how to (or not to) make things interactive, I think you'll find some useful content in this case study. And if you are writing as a profit making venture, you should be interested in these topics or risk being passed by.

DISNEY'S FIRST EBOOK ORIGINAL NOVEL

Disney is publishing its first ebook original novel, "Confessions of a High School Vampire: Birth." (Maybe just in time--can the vampire thing last more than another 15 minutes?) 

It's based on a web series at Disney's Take180 web site, which launched in March, 2009. I'd never seen it, probably because I'm not in the target demographic. The subheading is "Awesome shows made with you. All 180 seconds or less." That reflects where a lot of things are going:

* short

* interactive

* geared to a young audience - in this case, judging by the generous amount of pink on the home page, mainly girls

The web show the ebook is based on is "I <3 Vampires" (I Heart/Love Vampires), apparently the most popular of their offerings. Other shows there include "ElectricSpoofaloo" (current episode: "LisaNova's Horny Handout"--relax, it's about rhinos) and "What Guys are Talking About."

HOW MANY EYEBALLS?

There have been 46 episodes of the vampire series so far and 13,769 people have registered at the site as fans. The number of views for the first episode is listed as 20,683, but only around 6,000 for many of the subsequent episodes.

For a Disney sponsored site, those numbers are not that impressive.

INTERACTIVE…OR NOT SO MUCH

You can join and put up a profile, take part in the forums, and leave comments on individual episodes. But how are the shows "Made with you"?

Most of the shows have challenges, asking you to answer a question. 

For Big Screen Spoofaloo you can tell them what movie you'd like them to parody. When I looked, there were 75 submissions.

For the show with my favourite title, "Hollywood is Like High School With Money," you're invited to tell them about a rival you had at school. (83 submissions). I can't see how that's going to influence anything. Which is why there may be:

TROUBLE IN INTERACTIVE LAND

I snooped around on the forums, and one post, made in July of this year, suggests that the site found it too much effort to be truly interactive. The post says the person writing it no longer finds the site worth her time: 

"What really ticked me off was the elimination of audience participation in favor of canned shows. The episodes became pre-recorded, and challenges weren't designed to influence the audience to submit ideas for the show, but rather to encourage editorial submissions surrounding a theme related to the show. The duration of these pre-produced episodes almost always breached 3 minutes (or 180 seconds), waving off the mission statement of Take180. T180 Studio's mission to produce shows with audience participation in episodes of 180 seconds or less was either forgotten or ignored.

"First Day" was the first series to do this, and its challenge asked viewers to share their terrible first-day-of-school experiences. Episodes were released every couple of days because there was no need to produce new episodes based off user input. The audience participation that once made Take180 so inviting made officially took leave."

There was no response to this post from the producers. Don't they bother to read the forums, or did they think the best way to deal with this objection was to ignore it? Neither option shows much commitment to interactivity. 

The most active forum is called The Countdown Game, and the object is to start a post with the number 10,000 and then each new post contains the next number down. Usually that's all it contains, a number. As of this writing, they're down to 7721. Yes, they posted 2,279 times...it's goal-oriented behaviour but--never mind, they're teen-agers.

WHAT CAN WE LEARN FROM THIS PROJECT?

Without information that Disney isn't likely to release, like how much it costs to make these shows, how much revenue they bring in from ads and sales of DVDs, and how switching to a much less interactive mode affected the number of participants, it's hard to draw any firm conclusions. I won't let that stop me. My semi-educated guesses are:

* It's harder than it looks to make a show truly interactive--certainly more expensive. If you have to wait for reactions and ideas from the audience, you can't shoot a big batch of shows at the same time. I'm guessing that may have been the main reason they switched. It's also difficult to know how to use input anyway. For instance, I've always felt that letting people vote on the direction of a plot isn't very satisfying since probably about half the voters feel left out because their choice didn't win. Hey, it's just like elections…

* It's a challenge to get massive number of viewers to sites that don't have a broadcast component (especially if they aren't actually interactive)

* It may still be worth the effort of creating such a site because you may be able to recoup your investment with spin-off products--but of course this is easier if you are an entity like Disney, with deep pockets and a ready-made distribution system.

I'll continue to keep my eyes open for projects in this new media space--if you find any worth a look, let me know via jurgenwolff@gmail.com.

(Whether you're writing for new media or old, you can benefit from friendly guidance and support. One way to get it is to enrol in my online Writing Breakthrough Strategy program. It starts again in mid-January and you can find out all about it at http://www.writingbreakthroughstrategy.com)

 

An innovative format for Young Adult writers (& a pretty good book trailer)

Here’s an interesting format designed to appeal to reluctant boy readers—one of the toughest markets to crack for a Young Adult novelist.

The series in question is “Tony Hawk’s 900 Revolution.” The blurb says, “At the dawn of the new millennium, Tony Hawk landed the first ever 900, finally capturing the Holy Grail of skateboarding. At that moment in time…everything changed. A mysterious force shattered his board and scattered the pieces across the globe. Today, a talented group of teens unite in an eternal quest to bring the board and its power back together again.”

It’s billed as “adventure, action sports and sci-fi all rolled into one!” That hits all the genres that teen boys typically go for.

The format twist that makes it more interesting is that each book includes a 16-page graphic novel section. That might attract the reluctant reader, who may start by reading the graphic novel part and then move on to reading the rest of the book. 

There are four books so far (of a projected 24), the first one by Donnie Lemke (with artist Caio Majdao), the others by M. Zachary Sherman and Majdao. To its credit the website has an author’s page with a brief bio and a Q & A for the two writers (not sure what happened to the artist's bio).

You can see the promo video for the series here—nicely in scynch with the target market, using stills from the graphic novel sections, titles, and some loud music and probably just the right length at 1:27 minutes.

PS: I’m only vaguely aware of Tony Hawk and I have no idea what the 900 is, but then I’m not the audience for this series. 

 

 

 

What is transmedia? Why is transmedia? And is it in your writing future?

Recently I went to a weekend workshop on transmedia. That’s the new term for multi-media, I guess. It means that you use several different media to let people experience a story. You might have a website, your fictional characters might be active on Facebook and Twitter, maybe you send out text messages, there could be some related live events and so on. The idea is to make stories interactive. Physicallyi interactive, I mean. To my mind, reading already is interactive.

One thing I discovered is that nobody knows how to do this very well yet. There have been loads of interesting experiments and some have garnered a fairly big following, but most are quirky and small-scale and wobbly.We're still looking for the Wright Brothers.

Actually, I worked on a big project along these lines 12 years ago. I was story editor and there were two other writers working with me and the director and the producer. This was in Switzerland and we had agreements for cooperation with a prime-time TV show, a national newspaper, and the main phone company. The core was going to be a weekly TV show but we also had plans for clever live events, websites, people would get text messages telling them where to go for clues to the mystery, etc. It was really fun.

Our project was a thriller in which someone seemed to be hacking into the TV station, the newspaper, leaving weird manifestos in public places, etc. At first it wasn’t going to be clear whether this was a benign person or an evil one.

We were going full speed ahead.

Then 9/11 happened.

All the stuff that was going to be entertaining suddenly was exactly the kind of thing people now were scared of.

End of project. We were all out of a job and the production company struggled to recover from the sudden hit to its cash flow. 

Listening to the speakers at the workshop it was clear that things haven’t actually advanced much. Yes, now the technology is more sophisticated (smart phones, iPads, Facebook, etc.) but what has to be driving the technology is a story so compelling and the interaction opportunities so entertaining or rewarding that we will want to give them our already scarce time and attention.

A lot of the examples that came up were, frankly, things that I don’t want to do.

“You can read a novel on an iPad and click on a video of the location where the action takes place!”

If I’m reading, I don’t WANT to look at a video of the location where the action takes place. I want to image it. I want the writer to write well enough that I imagine it without even knowing I’m imagining it. (Non-fiction is a different matter.)

"You can read a mystery that features a puzzle you have to solve before you're allowed to continue reading!"

Are you trying to make my life more complicated? If I want to play a game, I'll play a game. If I want to read, I'll read. 

“You can interact with other people reading the same book! You can instantly chat with them!”

I don’t want to chat with anybody before I finish the book.  If I love the book I’ll chat about it with friends. I’ll recommend they read it, too. Maybe I’ll buy them a copy.

By the way, I fully accept that these reactions may be a function of having grown up as a reader of books. It could be that the only way to get many of today's and tomorrow's kids to read is to make it a game. If they read ten pages of "To Kill a Mockingbird" they get to play a round of "Angry Birds."

Despite my reservations, I do find transmedia fascinating. At the moment it seems like a bunch of technologies looking for a purpose, but the person who figures out how to use it to serve the story instead of the other way around will add a great new dimension to storytelling…and will make a lot of money. 

 

In case you want to write for teens

Because I’m writing a Young Adult novel at the moment and don’t have any teen-agers in- house, I started reading a book called Teen Scene, which is written by a teen to help parents have a better relationship with their teen offspring. It was all going well until the author, Dana Bernstein, suggested questions for when you are chauffeuring your teen around and the conversation has ground to a halt (or never started). Below you will find the questions and, in italics, my best guess as to the answers you’ll get:

• Anything interesting/exciting/funny happen at school today? No.
• What's new in your life? Nothing.
• How does this year compare to last year? What kind of weird question is that?
• If you had to pick your favorite year, what would it be? The year I get my own driver’s license.
• How was yearbook/tennis practice/debate today? Fine.
• What did you learn at school today? Nothing.
• What's your hardest/easiest subject? I hate all of them.
• What TV shows are your friends watching? You wouldn’t know them.
• Who has a bad reputation at school? You want me to narc? Forget it.
• Who is the smartest person you know? (sarcastic: You.)
• What is the best video game out today? I don’t know, whatever.
• Where should we go on vacation this year? I don’t want to go.
• Did you have any weird dreams last night? The sheet was like that when you put it on.

The upside of all this is that if you’re writing books about teens, they can be shorter, because the conversations sure will be.

 

A different approach to freewriting that can help you get unstuck

I had an email asking me whether I ever use freewriting and whether I recommend it. Freewriting means writing whatever comes to mind for a set period of time without stopping. It’s a good way to warm up. I don’t do that version very often but I do use a form I call targeted freewriting.

For instance, let’s say you’re writing a novel or screenplay but can’t figure out what comes next, or perhaps what you thought comes next isn’t working. In that case I’d suggest five to ten minutes of freewriting about your protagonist and any other important characters in that part of your story; another session freewriting about what led up to the part where you got stuck; and another session freewriting about as many possible next steps as you can think of. Then re-read all of these and quite often you’ll find a solution to your problem.

It’s still freewriting in that you’re allowed to go off topic if that’s what comes to mind. You might start writing about your protagonist’s feeling, which reminds you about an experience you had (so you write about that) and that leads you to writing about a story you read in the paper. When you go back to re-read that, stay alert for any clues that could help you solve your story problem—they may be hidden in the news article or in your own memory, for instance.

(for a wealth of techniques for writing your book or screenplay, see my book, "Your Writing Coach," published by Nicholas Brealey and available from Amazon and other booksellers.)

How to build your novel or screenplay plot with questions

If you’re having problems plotting your novel or screenplay or even a short story, using questions can help you in several ways.

First, identify the BIG question. This one should cover the entire arc of the story.  For instance:

Most action pictures: Will the good person prevail over the bad people?

Most romantic comedies: Will the two people end up together?

Most dramas and comedies: Will the protagonist get what he or she needs? (Quite often they start out going after what they want but then realize what they need is something else and go after that.) You would specify in your statement what the want or need or both are.

For the first two, most of the time the answer is “yes.” Even for the third, much of the time it’s “yes.” This means that in order to hold our interest you have to set and answer a bunch of other questions. However, being clear on that big question first makes sure you have a story spine. The next major question is:

What gets in the way? In other words, what obstacles will the protagonist encounter in the process of trying to vanquish the evil people, or win the girl/boy, or get what they need?

The logical follow-up is: How will the protagonist overcome these obstacles? (Or, if it’s a tragedy, how will he or she fail to overcome them?)

That gives you the basics of your plot. Next:

What’s fresh about this version of the story?

There are no new stories, only new ways of telling them. Ideally, you have come up with some interesting variations of the obstacles we’ve all seen. Intimately tied into this is:

Why should we care?

This gets us to characters. If we don’t like the potential lovers or the cop or your other protagonist or find them interesting, we’re not going to care about obstacles or solutions, either. Of course the more you know about your characters, the more ideas you’ll have for the kinds of obstacles and solutions. This means in a character-based story probably you will want to start with this question and then go on to the ones about obstacles and solutions.

Much of the time it pays to bounce back and forth, adjusting your answers as you figure out more about your characters and their challenges.

If you can answer these questions before you start writing, the odds are you have a sound foundation for your story. It may well change as you go along but you’ll have the comfort of a story skeleton to guide you.

 (There is lots more writing guidance in my book, "Your Writing Coach" published by Nicholas Brealey and available from Amazon and other online and offline booksellers.)

 

A genius still writing in his 80's

Maurice Sendak is known world-wide for the picture books he wrote and illustrated, such as In the Night Kitchen and Where the Wild Things Are, and now he’s come out with the first book he’s both written and illustrated in 30 years. It’s called Bumble-Ardy and he told Vanity Fair he was inspired by Giuseppe Verdi:

His glory was in his 80s. A new librettist, Arrigo Boito, came into his life, and he said, ‘Look, Verdi, you can compose better than you’ve done.’ The two operas they collaborated on, Otello and Falstaff, are brilliant.

Dave Eggers, who wrote the Vanity Fair article, says Sendak took comfort, too, in the composer’s famously difficult disposition:

Verdi was malcontent and brooding, and that made me feel better. You can’t write masterpieces in your 80s and be happy too.

The new book is about a pig whose parents never give him a birthday party the first eight years of his  life, and then they’re eaten. He goes to live with an Aunt who throws a party for him on his ninth birthday and it goes totally out of control.

Sendak says, “This is obviously the work of a man with dementia, but I’m very happy with it.” 

(It's never too late to start writing! Not sure how to go about it? Go to www.timetowrite.com and pick up one of my free "Getting Started" guides to writing novels, short stories, or screenplays. Also get my book, "Your Writing Coach," published by Nicholas Brealey and available from Amazon and other online and offline booksellers.)

 

The future of children's books looks like this

If you want to get a glimpse of the future of books for younger kids, you might want to have a look at TouchyBooks. These are books for smartphones and tablets, and they all feature interactive elements. They are created by a combination of writers, artists, and tech experts. They include animations and original music scores.

 

They also have a cooperation arrangement in which publishers, content owners, and writer/illustrators partner with them to turn their material into this kind of format. The revenue sharing is 50/50 (it’s not clear from the site whether or not there is any upfront financial obligation for the content providers).  Publishers Weekly reported that Touchybooks have had more than 700,000 downloads of their app, and a catalogue of 70 titles, both new and classic titles. They are going for 200 titles by the end of 2011 and also will be releasing a software program that will enable illustrators and publishers to make their own interactive books to sell in app stores.

I’m not a sales rep for them, I just think it’s useful for authors to know where things are going—and if you happen to be an author/illustrator or a writer who has an illustrator to team with, it could be worth finding out more. Here’s a very short demo video: