Some people still do believe that all you have to do to write proper fiction is to sit in front of your computer and start typing. You know that old Hemingway quote: ‘All you have to do is sit in front of your typewriter and bleed’? Well, I love that quote, but it makes it well easier than it is.  Much of my writing is done away from any writing device. It’s done in bed, sometimes when I wake up in the middle of the night, or in the shower, or as I drive, or as I walk on the beach or take a cup of coffee. Because even after you outlined the shit out of your narrative, even though you know your characters by heart and you are absolutely certain what needs to come next, you still need to lay down the scene. You still need to figure out what’s happening in a scene, the details, the breathing of the scene. Most of the time I won’t be able to start writing before I know exactly how the scene will play out. This is what I’ll be speaking about today.

Brian De Palma is not one of my favorite directors. He directed a few good movies but there is always a thing or two that will bother me in them. In particular, I think he tries hard to do the same things that Hitchcock did and the old master was way better than he ever will be. Still, THE UNTOUCHABLES is a movie I already watched many times and it does not turn me away. Kevin Costner is good in it, and both Sean Connery and Robert DeNiro are superb. And it has a good script. Tonight I saw it again and it made me want to write about a particular scene. They say a good movie always has a Watercooler Moment, that moment you will be talking about the next day with your co-workers by the watercooler on the coffee break. In THE UNTOUCHABLES it is definitely the 9-minute-long Train Station Shootout Scene. You can watch it here.

First of all, the basics. A good scene should have the same structure as the story itself, meaning: Act One – the beginning; Act Two – the development; Act Three – the conclusion. And if it is really a good scene, it will have a build up and a pay off, where the tension is increased until it releases. I spoke of these concepts here.

So let’s look at the scene. Eliot Ness (Kevin Costner) and his man George Stone (Andy Garcia), are going to capture Al Capone’s bookkeeper as he boards a train at 12:05. Both men are well armed as they enter the train station. Ness will be guarding the main entrance while Stone goes across the hall to guard the South entrance. The writer knows this will be the most important confrontation in the movie – if the lawmen can capture the bookkeeper and make him testify, Capone will go to jail. The outline will say something like: ‘Ness and Stone go to the Train Station and capture the bookkeeper.’ But now the writer must make the scene memorable. It must be a shootout that will put the people on the edge of their seats. So he decides Eliot Ness’s position – the hero will be at the top of the staircase, overlooking as much of the train station as he can. As soon as Ness is in that position, the scene will play out from his POV: the camera gives you that effect, but it could be done with words.

Now, should the enemy gunmen just come in and everybody shoot? Not good enough. Let’s do Act One, let’s build up the tension. Ness sees Stone crossing the train station – he will be too far away to be of sudden help, we gather. There are two janitors cleaning the floor, minding their businesses. What are they talking about? What kind of foul stain are they cleaning on their knees? The clock shows the time: 11:56. A baby cries downstairs. Ness looks down. A lady comes pushing a baby cart with a crying baby towards the steps. She also carries two heavy suitcases. She puts the suitcases down so she can calm the baby down. Through this, we are waiting, just like Eliot Ness is. We are feeling the tension rising as he is.

The loudspeaker warns passengers to board the train. The baby is still crying as the woman is having trouble calming him down. The main doors open. Who is coming? A couple with their suitcases. They go downstairs and around the baby cart, moving away. Nothing here is important, seemingly. There are no plot-points, nothing major going on. But every detail is important notwithstanding. The way the doors open and we don’t know who will enter. The way the loudspeaker urges people towards the train – we know the time is running out. The fact that the mother and the baby are in a dangerous place without knowing, without having a chance to escape… All of this is well thought and plays a part in the building up.

Then Ness takes notice of a well-dressed man stopping by a pillar. By Ness’s reaction, he must be a gangster. Is he? Slowly, the lady turns the cart around and starts pulling it up the stairs. She puts one suitcase on a step behind her, and then the other, and then she pulls the cart one step. Then she begins again: one case, then another, then pulling the cart one more step. Ness is becoming more and more nervous. More people come in, the clock keeps moving, the main doors open, the speaker warns. A woman comes downstairs and kisses the man by the pillar and they go away. He wasn’t a gangster after all. Finally, a plot-point: Ness decides he must do something about the woman and the child and he abandons his position to help them. As he starts pulling the cart up, the first gangsters arrive. And the Second Act begins. The whole First Act served the essential purpose: it raised the tension.

The Second Act begins as one after the other, several gangsters come into the station and go down the stairs. Ness just wants to drag the baby cart to safety but he knows everything is about to happen. He starts pulling it more urgently. But as he is on the final steps another gangster comes in and recognizes him. And the shootout begins. As he shoots the first gunman, he inadvertently pushes the baby cart and it slides down the steps.

And suddenly Ness has two conflicting purposes: he must shoot the bad guys to survive and he must get hold of the baby cart before it crashes on the bottom of the stairs. De Palma shoots all this in slow-motion or the whole thing wouldn’t work, there are too many moving parts. But it works: bad guys and bystanders die, and at the last moment Stone comes running from the other end of the station and is able to catch the baby cart before it crashes. Break into the Third Act.

In the Third Act of the scene, there’s a hostage situation. The last gangster holds the bookkeeper at gunpoint and threatens to kill him. The bookkeeper, on the other hand, promises to spill all the beans as long as the lawmen save him. Maintaining his coolness, Ness orders Stone to take the shot and it’s perfect.

The Second and Third Acts of this scene might be evident and you would not be surprised to find something similar in a normal action movie. But what makes this such a great action scene is the First Act. The set-up. De Palma confessed he took inspiration for the baby cart from this scene of Eisenstein’s BATTLESHIP POTEMKIN. Was it necessary? Was the baby cart important for the overall story? No. But it was important for the story of this scene. It raised the stakes. It made it different. It created tension.

Can you manage the tension and the energy of your scenes like this? Can you make complex but structured scenes? I try to do it all the time and I’m always excited when it works. Until next time, fellow knights.

A few days ago I read a post on Facebook asking a similar question. Many would then answer that ‘No. Writers should stay off politics for their own sake. People will be turned off from your books if you’re political.’ I often wonder that myself. A few years ago I was severely criticized by a consulting client of mine for being political: not that I was politicizing the work I did for her – not in the slightest – but still she complained about the political posts I would publish on my personal Facebook page. She even said that she cut me off a project because her client researched my Facebook page and disliked some of my political posts.  ‘Not professional’, I was told. And I guess I wonder as well if I would have more followers to this blog if I didn’t take any political stance at all in some of the posts. If I was famous and very successful, I’d probably wouldn’t need to think about these things (or would I?), but as I’m still making my name, maybe a political stance is disadvantageous and turns away some parts of the market. So let me speak a little bit about what I think about that, please bear with me.

As you may know by reading this blog, I’m a fan of Hannah Arendt. And even if you believe with Weber that the bureaucracies and the System actually protect us and prevent the savagery of the wild, I would still argue that you should believe with Arendt that the System itself is absolutely dependent on the people that operate it and on the Ethics of these people. The Evil in the System, tyrannies and autocracies, come from banal ignorance, superficial opportunism and fear of investment. Let me explain what I mean by this and why I speak of this.

A few months back I wrote here a four-post series about the MATRIX TRILOGY. It shows how those movies inspired me and had a great impact on me. In those posts, I explained how I believe we develop as people and how we can mature into solid, ethical and free individuals. I also say that I believe there are three kinds of people: 1) The submissive slaves; 2) the rebels and radicals; and 3) the Thinking People.

So, in the beginning, we are taught conformity. Even though as babies and children we feel we are the center of the world, we are taught since the get-go that we need to conform to norms and other people. And it’s important that we learn the lesson, otherwise we will be unable to relate with other people and even ourselves, as we face the frustration of reality. Conformity to norms enables us to live with others and thrive. Remember, it seems the Neanderthals had a bigger brain and were stronger than Homo Sapiens, but our species knew how to work together and face the challenges of the elements by socializing.  However, if conformity goes unchecked, we become submissive slaves, unable to make our own minds about what surrounds us, maybe hiding our more honest opinions deep inside ourselves so not to offend the Other or from fear of retaliation. Still, submissive slaves are de pillars of what Arendt calls: ‘the banality of Evil’. People who will do anything the System will ask of them without much question allow the most catastrophic wrong-doing to happen. They even support this wrong-doing, as we have seen in Nazi Germany.

To overcome the entrapment of conformity, we can rebel and break the rules, even becoming radicals. Well, I do believe that this rebellion is very much necessary and enables us to innovate and become better as individuals and as a society. But breaking the rules and rebelling is nothing more than allowing the ‘wild’ to return within ourselves. It’s releasing our inner Neanderthal. But a sustainable System, needing balance, is usually able to counter this rebellion: madhouses and prisons and medications are made for that. I also do not believe that our most wild ‘self’ is our ‘real’ self, as some would argue. Breaking the rules for the sake of breaking the rules brings us nothing but violence and extreme behavior. It’s just another way of conformity, another way of being a slave. Just think of some of the things we are ‘supposed’ to do: in Universities, we are supposed to ‘experiment’, we are supposed to ‘try drugs’, we are supposed to ‘get drunk in parties’ ‘get wild at Spring Break’, etc. Are really all those things ‘breaking the rules’ or just another form of conformity? And how about cops and lawyers that aren’t supposed to ‘snitch’ on each other? Or CEO’s that should be allowed ‘to bend the laws’ to save the bottom line? Or flat-earthers? Or ‘jihadists’? Aren’t all these people another kind of ‘slaves’ to the System, in some kind of illusion of liberty for being ‘radicals’ and ‘rebels’?

An Ethical, whole Human Being, a free person, should be able to rise above both these kinds of conformity and be able to live according to the Reality Principle: understanding that choice is a complex ethical thing, that you have to deal with consequences when you choose freely, but that sometimes the only way to do that is to break the rules, and sometimes it is important to obey the rules. This is the core of what makes us Human. Our ability to think in a complex way – taking into account feelings and emotions, other people, principles and laws, ethical standards, etc.

What does all this have to do with politics? Arendt found out in the 20^th Century that the origins of totalitarianism reside in the abnegation of political life from a considerable portion of the population. Meaning: when a considerable portion of the population starts to detach itself from politics and focus on their own narrow lives, political stupidity rises to the center. Populists with charismatic traits and easy stupid ideas that merely sound good become able to move the masses of submissive and rebel slaves alike. As people stop thinking deeply about complicated things it is easy to mislead them by going against what’s uncomfortable or unpleasant. Submissive slaves want nothing more than being comfortable; rebellious slaves want nothing more than being pleased. And yet, most important issues are complex, and most useful and effective solutions are uncomfortable or unpleasant. Populists just need easy answers to raise the crowds, and populism is the first step towards totalitarianism.

How can we counter this? We can counter this by becoming Thinking People. People who can make complex and intelligent choices. And then, we must become engaged people. We must count in a political world. We must be heard. And it will become uncomfortable for us, and it will become unpleasant. But if we are engaged we can change things, and we can prevent something horrible or disastrous to happen – just by being engaged along with many others we engage and inspire. Our opinions matter.

Fiction exists to educate. Since the beginning of storytelling, this is so. All I am as a writer is because of what I read, what I watched, and what I heard. And what I thought. Could I be more successful if I avoid politics altogether? It may seem so at first glance, but it would be a perversion of all that I believe in. I believe we must get engaged. And what I believe in constitutes my Voice. And before I knew my own Voice, my writing sucked. Read about it here.

Am I wrong? Even wrong opinions are important and should be voiced – I would love to talk to you some more about ON LIBERTY by John Stuart Mill and freedom of expression, but I’ll do that another time. See you around the next campfire, fellow warriors.

I’m writing an article for a Portuguese magazine on how to finish a story and I thought I’d write something of the sort up here. First things first. I see many people intensely focused on getting the first sentence right – I believe, in my heart, that the last sentence is far more consequent. You are able to forgive and forget an average or mediocre first sentence – as long as the first scene is good, the first sentence doesn’t really have a lot of weight, that’s what I believe. You can start with ‘It was a dark and stormy night’ all you want – very few people, I believe, would stop reading because of that. The last sentence, however, will be responsible for your reader’s lasting impression of the book and will have an impact on the Word of Mouth we all need. This said, this post is not about the last sentence so much as the last full Act altogether.  The last Act is where it all fits together and that’s one of the most important parts. In my view it’s not necessarily the most difficult part – I actually think the second Act progression to be more difficult to achieve. When we start a story, or at least when I start a story, I usually know Point A (where the protagonist is starting) and Point B (where the story will end). Being able to steer from one to the other in an interesting way is, on the whole, the hardest challenge. However, the final Act has its own difficulties and that’s what I’d like to talk a little bit today.

A story is like a treasure map. The reader starts at the edge of the map and starts following it until he/she reaches the X. The X is the place where the treasure is buried, the last few pages, and if the treasure is not there, the reader will feel furious and frustrated. So whatever we do, we have to show the reader the treasure he was promised. Some people believe this to be a ‘happy ending’, but that’s not true. The treasure is not a happy ending, the treasure is Catharsis.

Let’s go back a few thousand years. Aristotle believed that the genesis of tragedy, and subsequent dramatic narratives and (let’s say) fiction writing as we know it today, started in religious rituals, in traditions linked to Dionysius. As people reveled in storytelling, they would purify their souls with the emotional jolt, mostly unhappiness (but let’s argue for happiness as well), at the end of the narratives. So Catharsis is that thing we feel at the end of a story when heroes triumph or perish.

I remember when I was 15 or 16 I went to watch ROCKY IV with my brother at a theater and that moment in the end when Rocky finally was able to punch the seemingly invincible Drago and draw blood the whole theater went wild and jumped in their seats. Also, every time I watch Zwick’s GLORY I cry at the end when the whole Regiment is slaughtered. This is Catharsis – this emotional jolt you get from stories. And that’s the treasure we promised our audience. To get it we have to invest and carefully build-up our characters so people care about the final situation. But it’s the final Act that will deliver the blow.

We must make sure that the final Act is satisfying. I often speak (see here) about a plotting tool I use, called the Snyder’s Beat-Sheet. The problem is that Blake Snyder’s 15 beats finish with these mysterious items: Break into Three; Finale; Final Image. Three beats that don’t tell you a whole damn lot about what to do in the Final Act. I only use the BS2 when I’m in trouble and need help figuring out what to do at a certain point – and Snyder’s last beats are not of much help – they just don’t tell you much. Fortunately, Snyder had a trick up his sleeve, what he called The Five-Step Finale. He said that you should look at a finale in terms of ‘Storming the Castle’. So here are the five steps:

• THE PLAN – The hero and his team come up with a plan to ‘storm the castle’, to solve the final problem. Remember in STAR WARS that last Resistance meeting where they plan the raid on the Death Star and show the plans and tell everybody about that shaft where you could put a bomb in and blow everything to smithereens? That’s the scene.
• THE OPERATION BEGINS – Following the plan, the hero and the team ‘storm the castle’. In STAR WARS the attack on the Death Star commences.
• IT’S A TRAP – As the attack continues, the hero and the team face failure as they see that what they want is not there, or it is impossible to achieve. In STAR WARS it becomes clear, as the fighters are destroyed one by one, that the task of reaching the shaft on the space station will not be achieved. No-one seems to be able to reach the target.
• THE NEW PLAN – It’s time for the hero to come up with a new plan, overcome difficulties and go for the gold. As Luke Skywalker dives towards the Death Star, the voice of Obi-Wan comes into his mind and says ‘Use the Force, Luke.’ Luke has seen that the other pilots were unable to find the target using the computer, so he turns it off and decides to use the Force.
• VICTORY – The hero executes the new plan and finally wins. Luke uses the Force and shoots into the shaft, blowing up the Death Star. He won.

Snyder’s Five-Step Finale is very useful when we are planning a satisfying ending. I usually try to have the protagonist face as much danger and hardship he cans at the final battle/challenge (could be a love story, works the same way). And if I planned it well and did my job, then the Final Image at the end will complete the full circle from the Initial Image at the beginning. See, for instance, in ALIEN: Ripley was awoken from crio-sleep at the beginning of the movie, and she goes back to crio-sleep, now alone with her cat, at the end of the movie. Or LOTR: Frodo and his friends were living happily on the Shire at the beginning of the story, and they are again happy on the Shire at the end, even though struggling with their scars.

The Full Circle is an important standard, but there is something even more important. People sometimes ask: can I or should I kill my MC at the end of the story? I normally reply: it depends on your Theme and your Message. I spoke a little bit about this here. What is the Message you want to convey? What is your Theme? Your whole story should be saying something. It should reflect something you want to say. And the best way to have a consistent ending is to understand exactly what you want to say. The underlying Theme of STAR WARS is, one way or another, Man against Machine. So the ending of the movie must be Luke defeating the Machine of the Empire, the Death Star, Darth Vader, using Human instinct and the spiritual Force. He turns off the computer because he is better than the computer. And he must live. If he had died at that point, the Machine would have won. The same reason for the MC’s to have died at the end of ROGUE ONE: because it is a movie about Sacrifice for a higher cause.

Well, that’s all I have to say about Endings at this point. Don’t forget to dot the ‘I’s and cross the ‘T’s, and take care of all loose ends. And good luck to you, fellow warriors. I hope this was useful. See you around the next campfire.

There are a few things about writing that are a mystery to pretty much everyone who never tried it. There are a few phenomena, in my experience, that happen to many or even most fiction writers that seem wild and almost crazy for someone on the outside. Something like Writer’s Block is commonly known and widely discussed. But there are other things that happen that not even writers understand, many figuring it is something that only happens to each of them. Over the years I have been meeting more and more writers and talked with many about their writing and confirmed that these kinds of phenomena are not a figment of the imagination. So today I’d like to talk about three of these things – see if they make sense to you.

• THE SORCERER’S APPRENTICE EFFECT

You know that Disney short movie in FANTASIA where Mickey Mouse plays the Sorcerer’s Apprentice who tries to wield his insipient magic to complete his domestic tasks by enchanting brooms and scrubs, making them wash dishes and clean the kitchen, and then they get out of hand and the apprentice loses control and soon the whole place is flooding and plates are breaking and everything becoming chaos? Well, sometimes that happens with our writing. I’m speaking in particular about the characters and how they sometimes refuse to do what we ask them to do. Maybe the Sorcerer’s Apprentice is not the right metaphor, as in the movie this happens because of the incompetence of Mickey Mouse, and in writing it happens, I believe, in spite of or because of a high level of competence of the writer.

Here are a couple of examples: in a recent WIP I had plotted that Character X would save the protagonist in the last Act. For that, Character X would have to get separated from his group in a fight. However, as I wrote the fight, it didn’t make sense that Character X, because of several of his characteristics, would be in a certain position and get separated – it would have become a mess. Instead, I took a seemingly major step (but actually quite simple to take) and decided to have Character Y get separated, and he’s the one appearing in the last Act and doing the saving.

Let me give you another fictional (but maybe better) example of the phenomenon: imagine a woman who comes home and finds her husband in bed with another woman; now, you have plotted the story and it requires that your character just runs out of the house and runs into the man she will eventually fall in love with. The problem is that you have been carefully building your female character and making her grow and even have some rebellious streak in this or that scene – and as she finds her husband with another woman, your character stops obeying your orders: she doesn’t want to run away, she wants to confront her husband right there and expel him from the home she mostly paid over the years. But if she does this, she won’t run into her new love interest. And now you have a problem. Should you ‘force’ her to run away? Or let her stay and fight?

Many people see this problem as a plotting/outlining problem, and thus it denounces a lack of preparation. I don’t see it that way. First, because not everyone is an Outliner, some people need to be looser as they write, and preparation will restrain their spontaneity and creativity. Second, because as you yourself get involved with your characters, you make them more real and you start adding small details and characteristics that you hadn’t thought of before, characters start moving in directions that are richer but not intentional. In my view, if you are doing the right things and writing from your heart, not only from your mind, you will have better characters and better stories. Characters become organic. And as characters become organic, you lose a bit of control over them. That may give you plot problems, and that’s a curious phenomenon. But you shouldn’t either feel incompetent nor overwhelmed – just fix the problem, either by re-writing the character or changing the plot. Remember: if you encounter this phenomenon you are doing something right.

• THE EMOTIONAL LINK

Say your story is developing very well. All the plot points were at the right places and happened just as you planned, and your characters have become bigger and fuller and richer and stronger. But then you have to kill one of them. It’s imperative. Your story demands it. But as you start to write the scene where the painful departure is going to happen, you feel anguish and sorrow. As you write it, your eyes swell and you start to cry. You are still writing and it’s incredible that you can even do it as tears flow down your face. You have to stop for a few minutes to dry them until you are able to resume your writing. As you finally finish and your beloved character is dead, you feel an overwhelming sense of loss. It’s as if that character was a real person. A person that really died in your life. But how silly is that? It came from your imagination, right? It was your puppet. Why is it affecting you so much? Is this normal?

I think anyone who ever cried at the end of a movie or jumped in triumph when the hero overcame impossible odds must be able to understand this phenomenon. Studies say that we experience in our brains the same things a character experiences on the screen or on the pages of a book. It’s that amazing identification phenomenon usually called ‘The Suspension of Disbelief’. To ‘enter’ the story and the characters, we suspend in our minds the obvious truth that those events are not really happening. Writers, however, must go much deeper than the usual audience. They must develop a true Emotional Link with them. I think it was David Mamet who said ‘Writers must be a bit schizophrenic.’  This happens, in my view, for two reasons: a) the characters we create are projections of our inner selves, our angels and demons inside of us, and; b) to make characters and scenes writers must ‘incarnate’ a character just as much as an actor does.

I think each of these reasons deserves a post for itself in the future. I’ll speak of Freud as the basis for a). As for b), I will probably write a post on Stanislavski’s system and Method acting. What do you think?

• THE CAESURA EFFECT

Here’s a strange one. So you’ve been writing for a while, maybe years, on that book you really wanted to write. You are coming to its end and you have been satisfied with all that’s been done until then. But suddenly, as the end approaches, the doubts start to appear. Is it good enough? Have I made the right choices? Will anyone like the story or the characters? And the act of writing itself becomes more and more difficult. Maybe you get blocked and can’t sit down to write any word at all. Maybe you procrastinate and find any excuse not to write. Because every time you sit in front of the computer it seems the weight of the world is on your shoulders. And as you get closer and closer to the end, it all becomes harder and harder.

This is what I call the Caesura Effect and I have been talking and writing about it since the 1990s. It happened to me several times before I identified it as a real phenomenon. What happens, I believe, is that you start to realize, consciously or not, that sometime in the near future you will lose control over your text. You will want to release it to the world, have it read, maybe publish it. And that feeling of powerlessness over the evaluation and criticism of others, that feeling you may be rejected, starts to become real to you. And if you invested a lot in your work, as you should, it will scare the bejesus out of you. But you must overcome it. You must cut the umbilical link. You must understand that if you never finish your story and free it to the world you are betraying yourself, your work, your characters, and your story. None deserves such a fate. If it becomes really hard to do the work just write it without care until the end and finish it anyway. You will have time to re-write afterward and submit it to an editor. If you do it after you have a few beta-readers going over it, better still. I promise you will be much happier if you do this. Finishing writing a novel or another great work is a feeling close to an orgasm. You will not forget it.

And that’s it, fellow warriors. Do you recognize these phenomena? Have you experienced them? Do drop a line and tell me about it. See you around the next campfire.