Once upon a time, television was the realm of poor acting and disenchanted directing and producing. It is said that long ago there was a Golden Age of television when wonderful shows as I LOVE LUCY, BONANZA or THE TWILIGHT ZONE actually changed the landscape, but that time had passed without much trace. All we had, then, was a bare scenery of superficiality and empty imagination. In those days we used to look at movies as the place for real dramatization and the home of talent. Very few actors with more than an ounce of self-respect and any ambition whatsoever would be caught playing for the small box and directors would get a better reputation creating video clips or commercials than working on television episodes. But then, something happened. Some would say that it was the advent of cable TV with its millionaire pay-offs or the prophecies of multiple channels and platforms in digital. However, another event comes to mind: suddenly, Writers became important. The figures of the Showrunners, Writers most of them, became warlords and noblemen. And then, as if by magic, the chains of mediocrity were destroyed and another Golden Age of television brought us a myriad of incredible and immensely talented shows. Legendary series as THE SOPRANOS or WEST WING surged from the shadows. And binge-watching was born with the likes of 24. Brilliant organizations as HBO and Netflix made history. Inevitably, as more and more shows target narrower and narrower niches, the Golden Age will slowly fade away. But let us enjoy its remnants while we can. As is my tradition, let me speak of a few shows I love, arranged in no particular order. I hope you like them as much as I do.

 

• GAME OF THRONES – I already talked about this incredible phenomenon here. I was already in love with this amazing story and characters well before it became a TV series. George R.R. Martin’s genius is apparent to anyone who passes their eyes through his texts. He dwarfs the likes of Tolkien or Rowling, in my view. And the series, worldbuilding in a massive unbelievable fashion, propelled him to stardom. It is a pity, of course, that Martin’s masterpiece wasn’t finished in the five years it took the series to catch up to the book’s storyline – I believe that as the screenwriters slowly replaced Martin himself, the quality of the plot diluted a bit. Maybe a lot. We still had brilliant writing, brilliant production design, and acting and directing until the end, but without the structure of Martin’s books, the producers were left to make poor plotting decisions that almost killed the series in the end. Still, it will be forever a phenomenon of the medium and the first of several HBO hits on this list.

 

• SHERLOCK – Steven Moffat, arguably one of the greatest TV writers of all time, signed what is perhaps the best adaptation of the novels of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle ever produced. The series design and Benedict Cumberbatch’s rendition of the sociopathic but genial detective overwhelm us with intelligence, balanced with the superb Watson of Martin Freeman and overshadowing forever the pathetic attempts of other movies and TV series to portrait these classical iconic heroes. Rarely have I seen genius so well represented and it is very difficult to keep your jaw from falling as you pursue the mysteries and conspiracies that come out of this series. And even if you feel obligated to focus on the brilliance of Cumberbatch and Freeman’s performances, and on the wonderful writing, we cannot miss the ever-talented directing that comes with it. We feel constantly one or two or ten steps behind Sherlock Holmes – as we should. And even the translation of the Victorian detectives to the modern age, with the clever adding of modern technology, does not break the link to Doyle’s novels. The different seasons, in the British tradition, are composed only by three or four movie-length episodes – but even if we spend only a few hours with this series, we will cherish every minute. Do not miss it.

 

• MR.ROBOT – The American response to the brilliance of SHERLOCK, Sam Esmail’s MR.ROBOT breaks some kind of mold. Extremely clever and profound, this series about a talented hacker involved in a powerful conspiracy to end the reign of oppressive massive corporations will blow your mind. The unbelievable Rami Malek gives life to this troubled and isolated hacker vigilante who always has a surprise up his sleeve. At each turn of the screw, we are left with more questions than answers but there is something extremely perturbing and relatable about the whole absurd story of Elliot Alderson, along with the surprising performance of Christian Slater. Still, what makes this show really powerful is the inspiring, creative and talented directing by Esmail. I really believe his name will become a household name in the near future, especially if he crosses the line into the realm of movies. He has a touch of Kubrick in him and his shots and solutions always feel a bit off and yet incredibly adequate.

 

• BAND OF BROTHERS – Here’s another show for the history books. Literally. It tells the true story of WWII’s 101^st Airborn Division’s Easy Company as this group of ordinary men become extraordinary by doing their job in the intense theatre of the European War, from the invasion of Normandy through to Germany itself. Sponsored by the capable and iconic hands of Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks, these 10 movie-length episodes use filming solutions we recognize in SAVING PRIVATE RYAN. The series is amazingly powerful, featuring also testimonies from the survivors of Easy Company themselves. With very few women through the whole thing, it is, however, one of the best war stories ever produced. It’s incredibly solid in every way. The directing, the music, the acting, the design, the producing, the cinematography: everything is top-notch in this 2001 HBO series.

 

• TRUE DETECTIVE – It is widely noted that this is a series that has been decreasing in quality since the outset. Each season is an isolated detective story and I do think that the third season, with Mahershala Ali and Stephen Dorff, is the lesser of the three so far. I liked the second season with Colin Farrel, Rachel McAdams and Vince Vaughn – the ending much better than the beginning, I must say. However, the season that made this series a legend was the first one: 2014’s season with Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson enacting a story by Nic Pizzolatto with the solemn and inspired directing of Cory Jojy Fukunaga. This first season was tense, heavy, challenging and finally extremely cathartic. An example of the exciting and fulfilling range of incredible TV shows of the current Golden Age.

There are a lot more shows that deserve mention, of course. It has been a privilege to witness this era of creativity in television, as we suffer the relatively bland products of the Hollywood movie business. As I said, let’s enjoy it while it lasts. There are already signs that the time of greats is passing. And this is all I have to say for tonight. See you around the next campfire, fellow travelers.

Someone asks: any tips on building up antagonists? I’ve heard of many things. Some people go with that mainstream thing: «no-one gets up in the morning thinking they will do something evil or thinking they are bad guys.» «They have always good reasons to be bad.» You know the type? «Maybe you should even go deep into their background and find out how they have been traumatized by their mother or something.» Don’t get me wrong: these are not particularly bad tips. They’re just a little bit, well… misguided.

Let’s just check a few bad guys, shall we? For instance, think of Spielberg’s JAWS. The antagonist is… a shark. A killing machine. It doesn’t really have a profound reason to be like it is. It just wants food. That’s it. And how about Mr.Smith in THE MATRIX? He’s a machine. He just wants to finish his mission and be free of ‘the smell’ of humans. No immediate Freudian conflict there, is there? No ‘I’m-a-good-guy’ syndrome. Very different from, for instance, Cersei in GAME OF THRONES. Her main motivation is to protect her family and especially her children – and she learned to be tough in order to do that. Or think of Magneto in X-MEN: he is a racist but he seems to have been cornered into that way of thinking – he just wants to survive, to be respected, to be free. Think of Hyman Roth, played by the smooth and wonderful Lee Strasberg in GODFATHER II – he is so subtle and normal, just doing business and looking like a gentle old man. All these antagonists are very different in-depth, subtlety, sophistication, cruelty, and strength – but they are all excellent antagonists. There is no one way to build up antagonists. In fact, the whole Craft of writing is mainly focused on building conflicts between antagonists and protagonists. There is also not one particular way to build up protagonists. If they serve the story, they can be perfect. And antagonists can simply be bad. There are evil people, and also sociopathic and psychopathic people who don’t know the difference between Right and Wrong, Good and Bad. And they don’t need particularly deep motivations to do very cruel things – as we can see throughout History. There are people who are motivated by basic Power, or the freedom to do Harm. There aren’t always ‘good reasons to be bad’. Yet, the story itself needs deeper motivations.

Some narratives don’t develop on the pillars of conflict. Virginia Woolf’s KEW GARDENS, for instance, which I find an excellent short-story, does not live on conflict. But the vast majority of stories are based on a conflict between antagonists and protagonists. It could be a story of Man against Nature, as in JAWS, or Man against God, or Man against Himself, but conflict based stories are the most straight forward, the easiest and the most common kind.  Even in love stories. At the center of love stories, there is always an obstacle to love. The better the obstacle the better the love story. And so, in Reiner’s WHEN HARRY MET SALLY we have a conflict between Love and Friendship. In Ephron’s SLEEPLESS IN SEATLE you have Distance as an obstacle to Love. In Austen’s PRIDE AND PREJUDICE, the main obstacles are… well… Pride and Prejudice.  You have a good obstacle to Love, you have a story.

So, in summary, a good antagonist must have one principal, important characteristic: His/her main goal is incompatible with the protagonist’s goal. That’s it. Now if you want a blunt instrument or a precise delicate scalpel is up to you and what you want to do with your story. If you want an evil chess master or a basic volcano, it’s up to you and the story. So it all comes down to the main goal of the protagonist. What does he/she want? And this goal depends on one thing… well… actually two: your Theme and your Message. What is your story about and what do you want your readers to retain in the end? What do you want your protagonist to learn or not to learn in the end? That you must not be too proud or too prejudiced to see Love just in front of you? Or that you can be so blind that you will lose your family as you try to protect it? Or do you want a protagonist so driven and stubborn, like Marv in Miller’s SIN CITY, that he will never learn until he’s dead?

Whatever you do, you must always ‘Save the Cat’ for a protagonist. I spoke about it here. The protagonist must be likable in some way, otherwise, we will not identify with him/her, and if we fail to identify with him/her, we will be in trouble to achieve the Catharsis in the end. Or you can invert the roles. You could argue that in MACBETH, for instance, we do not care for the protagonists, we care for the antagonists. But we must care for someone. For someone we identify with. We suffer with. Because that is the next step in the phenomenon of storytelling, the phenomenon that Aristotle once described: we suffer with our characters. And at that moment is the thing that we must really take care: the Human Drama. Even though the story lives on diversity, on the uniqueness we impose on it, what really draws people in is the identification with the deeper problem of the character. The deep common problem of the protagonist and/or antagonist.

Think of a movie like JAWS: a sheriff who is scared of water and who came to a small coastal community to escape from the confusion of urban civilization is confronted with the threat of a killer shark. The Theme is Man against Nature – or Civilization against Nature. The Message is: only when you respect Nature can you deal with it (or something of the sort) – Civilization disrespects Nature at its own peril. Now, this is a deep common problem that affects all of us and which most of us can relate with. How you then develop it around the conflict between a sheriff and a shark and make it a unique story is at the core of your talent as a writer.

And that’s all I have to say for now. See you around the next campfire, fellow knights.

Today came out an article of mine on Writing in English in the Portuguese Portal of Fantasy and Science Fiction. I talk about my difficult and somewhat controversial decision to write in a language which is not my native Portuguese and how it worked. You can read it here:

Why Write in English: The Journey From My First Language to the Second 

Hope you like it!

Many years ago I started learning about Learning. I was fresh out of college and I started getting involved in Executive Training. I ended up becoming a trainer and educating all kinds of publics in behavioral matters – from top executives in imposing multinationals to the unemployed poor or the young outcasts. It was an incredible journey and it made me think about a lot of things – including ‘what is our role as educators’? Now – teaching short courses on some matters may seem an unimportant role in the Education business, but it has a few characteristics that give us trainers some perspective. First of all, we mostly do not give grades to our students: we are graded ourselves – students grade us. Secondly, we are hired for our effectiveness and reputation: if we aren’t good at what we do, we don’t make a living – so grades matter. Thirdly, and in my particular case, I worked with a whole range of students with many different traits – showing me what works in general and how to adapt this or that. Fourthly, we actually have training in education and pedagogy – something you would be surprised how many teachers and educators actually lack – including most professors in this or that. And finally, we have a lot of freedom about what we teach – making us both more accountable and more creative in the way we work. I have a degree in Business Administration and I ended up studying a lot of Psychology and Law besides that subject – but pedagogy was something I really had to learn. It also informed me and built me up a lot for when I ended up teaching Creative Writing and Screenwriting. And there are a few things I want to share with you about all this.

First, Education is not about Information. In my parents’ time, the stuff they taught in school would make you giggle in embarrassment nowadays. My parents had to memorize all the railroads in Portugal, and all the rivers and waterways. You had to know the capitals of all Portuguese provinces and districts as well as the ones for major countries in the world. So in the past, much of the matters taught in school were about two things: discipline to memorize, and Information. Today, that would be absurd. We have computers and networks to memorize Information and there isn’t a single thing of the data I mentioned above that would take more than a few seconds’ search on a Smartphone by a 10-year-old.

Education is also not about Knowledge in the stricter sense of the word. Knowledge in a broad sense means a lot of things and it can comprehend many of the concepts I’ll be talking about, but Knowledge in the stricter sense is just a more sophisticated and comparative way to process Information. A lot of the Knowledge we have in the world is also accessible by Smartphone if you search for opinions of many academics on any particular search or for articles on this or that subject. So, in this sense, Education is not about Knowledge as well – Knowledge falls short.

And Education is not about Skill. It’s not about how to do this or that. For a while, behavioral training was involved in this shroud of theory about Skills. The goal of training, some said, is to develop Skills in trainees. However, anyone who’s been there and knows a couple of things about this will know that it is impossible to develop the Skill of a Leader in 16 hours, or get someone to write better in 8 hours. And also, you just spend a few minutes in any classroom around the world and you’ll gather that developing Skills is not in the mind of most teachers – they are looking for something else. Skills are not enough.

Education is also not about what to think about something. Many people would like you to think in a certain way about a whole lot of things. I can see it in Creative Writing, for example: people are taught to write in a certain way, discouraged to use certain words or certain techniques, stick to a certain POV or dismember this or that character, etc. This is called Indoctrination and it is similar to Religious training – it limits your Skill and Creativity.

What I read once, somewhere, and impressed me ever since is the following: Education is about Options. Education is about improving our students’ resources and give them more options to deal with a range of problems. Education is about Critical Thinking and about Freedom. In other words: it’s about developing someone’s ability to analyze a problem and devise the best course of action from the wider possible range of solutions for that problem – including brand new solutions. This is absolutely essential for Creative Writers: as every single publisher and every single reader out there is always looking for a unique text. Success in writing depends on both your effectiveness and your uniqueness. And this can only be achieved through Critical Thinking and Creativity (thus, Freedom).

Now, this text was prompted by two things I read that illustrated the two sides of this spectrum. On one side was an article from an academic calling himself elitist and debunking writings from non-academics, saying non-academics are lazy and don’t study all kinds of hypotheses and thinking that was done for thousands of years. Academics, he seemed to say, have more Knowledge than others and so they know better. I don’t completely disagree with this assessment, to be honest: academics study a lot and know a lot and most of the time they are the spearheads of our Knowledge. Universities all over the world significantly and systematically and constantly improve our lives. But I have a few issues about that ‘elitist’ claim about academics. I know a few academics and believe me: many times they are simply wrong. This happens because they are not perfect and because our Knowledge is not perfect, but also because Academia is many times more concerned with politics and money than with Knowledge and Education. Academics themselves don’t agree with each other and sometimes they don’t commit to opinions themselves. On the other hand, as Kurt Lewin once said: «There’s nothing more Practical than a good Theory.» Yet, many theories out there are simply not practical: they can be right in a lab, but they don’t work in real life. When we are stuck with Academia we are often limiting our options and that is a pity.

On the other side of the spectrum was a comment made to me by a Trump-supporter. He accused me of basing my opinion on fake news coverage and movie-star rants. That is not true: I read books on History, books on Politics, and books on Economics, and a lot in between. That gave me a little bit of Knowledge and helped me analyze the problems and think about the options on the table. I base my opinions on my Education and my Knowledge and the opinions of many – not on Indoctrination, Emotional Attachment or Religious Thinking. I say Trump is nepotistic not because someone said so but because he appointed his daughter and son-in-law to the White House. I say he is a racist not because someone told me but because of what I heard him say after Charlottesville. I say he is a sexual abuser because of what I heard him say about women, because his lawyer is in jail for helping him with his abuse and because I believe the accounts of dozens of women about his abuse. I say he is autocratic as I see him try to circumvent the Judicial and the Legislative branches. I equate him with Nazis because of what I see him do and say about immigrants. I say he is corrupt because of scandal after scandal, of resignation after resignation of corrupt officials from his Executive. I say he conspired with the Russians as I hear Intelligence officials testify in Congress and as I see him bow down to Putin in Copenhagen and in every international policy of the United States for the last two years. And on and on…

The best antidote to tyranny and stupidity is Education. We need to develop our Critical Thinking and our Free Thinking to improve our lives, our society, our world, and our culture. And that’s the role of Education and educators: to improve our options. To improve other people’s options. To get us all to make better decisions. We don’t need to be dried up academics, but it is incredibly dangerous for all if we allow ourselves to be dragged down by prejudice and ignorance. Knowledge, in the broader sense – in the sense that includes Skill and Information and Critical Thinking and Wisdom – improves our options and our decisions. So let us commit to it, I challenge you. Our Freedom depends on it.

I used to be a very annoying kid. I had a fascination for movies since a young age and I would spend hours chasing people down to be able to describe to them thoroughly the latest movie I’d watched. Every single scene. And until my 20’s I was capable of remembering every single movie I had seen. After that, the movies became too many or my memory too evasive and I started making mistakes about this or that picture, this or that actor, this or that name. I still remember very well the first PG-13 movie I saw in a theatre. It was 1977’s Mike Newell’s mediocre THE MAN IN THE IRON MASK. My parents took me one evening, while my younger brother and sister remained at home. I felt like the luckiest kid in the world. This was at Cine Santa Maria, in Funchal, Madeira, Portugal. I don’t know if it still exists. And I remember the first PG-13 movie I went with my brother: it was 1980’s THE SEA WOLVES, with Gregory Peck, Roger Moore, and David Niven, and we saw it at Cine Casino, in the same city, where we lived. And I remember the first James Bond movie I ever saw: it was THUNDERBALL and I saw it with my father and brother in Lisbon in ’82 or ’83.  And the first time I saw THE SOUND OF MUSIC with my mother and siblings at a theater in Lisbon. And 2001 – A SPACE ODYSSEY in Lisbon which I saw with my mother when I was 13. I hated it then. Love it now. See how annoying I can become? Movies blow me away. I love them. I can’t stop talking about them.

For a long long time, I never dared to think I could be involved in making them. I’m a Portuguese writer living in a country with a poor tradition in movies – and as I grew up and through most of my adulthood, the movies made in Portugal were absolutely not movies I’d want to see. Nobody made commercial movies in this country for 50 years. Now there are a few attempts at it, but poor and far between. No-one makes movies in Portugal without a subsidy from the Government. And when it comes, the producers get immediately most of the money they will ever get from it. So they don’t have any incentive to please the public – they just have to please the 5-person jury that decides who is getting the money. It’s a horrible corrupt system and it supports horrid uninspiring amateurish movies they make every year. It also works by promoting and feeding a very small group of so-called professionals. We, the Portuguese, ended up being successful in breeding good film technicians who work every year and are well trained, but we are very poor at developing talent who could direct, write, produce and create good movies.  We have literary writers on par with the best in the world. We have a few who have earned or deserved the Nobel Prize.  Think of people as Saramago or Fernando Pessoa. For such a small country, it’s really amazing. But when it comes to scriptwriting, we are awful. Scriptwriting, I usually say, is the most technical of all Fiction writing. You really need to know what you’re doing. And in this country, for the most part, people don’t.

When I started writing movies I didn’t know that much about it. I wrote a few scripts over the years, in my 20’s. I wrote some short-movies and some long features. It can be very frustrating to write for cinema because you can write and write and write but unless you convince someone to produce the movie, it will never leave your desk drawer. Writers are the only professionals in filmmaking who do all the work before there is even a glimpse of some money coming in. You can write many scripts, for years, without earning a cent! Just look at Guillermo del Toro, the Award-winning writer-director: the other day he unveiled 17 scripts he completed without ever having the chance to make them. 17 scripts! This is the commitment a screenwriter must have to the Craft.

I never wrote 17 scripts. At least not long features, anyway. I wrote nine or ten. Some of them when I had no idea what I was doing. But I did know a few things people around me didn’t. I remember I was invited by a movie director to watch the first cut of his million-dollar movie. I watched it and when he asked me what I thought, I said: «Well, you have an 80-minute movie with a 20-minute ‘set-up’…» To which he replied: «What’s a ‘set-up’?» That’s how bad it was… Still, I did know what a ‘set-up’ was. And yet, my scripts weren’t being produced and I still was an outsider to the Portuguese would-be-film-industry (and I guess I still am).

Then one day, a friend of mine, a young movie director called Nuno Madeira Rodrigues invited me to co-write a thriller in English with him. We worked on the script for a year. I always thought it was a good exercise, but I had learned over the years it most likely never be made. He, however, always believed we could produce it and got the money for it. And so we produced the movie. We ran castings in L.A., and in Lisbon, and in New York – American, British and Portuguese actors. We filmed in a small town in Portugal called Oliveira de Azeméis and in Lisbon, and in Oporto, and in Brooklyn, N.Y. And it was a nightmare. We were way over our heads. Every single day there was an impossible challenge we had to overcome. It was a mess, not the least because people in Portugal were not used to do the things we were doing. But we got it done. I don’t know how, but we did. We called it REGRET. And we had it distributed in the US. And in Canada. And Puerto Rico and other territories. You can still watch it at Amazon, here. Of course, we never made a cent from it, but it was an incredible experience: both frustrating and rewarding – I can still find things I really like and things I really hate in the movie, not unlike the experience of producing it.

Since then I’ve written four more short-scripts and two TV-pilots that were produced. None was particularly successful, but it doesn’t matter. I loved doing them. And so here are a few random lessons I learned from these experiences:

1. Stop Following Your Dreams – Dreams are both too little and too much. Too little because Reality is so much richer and full of surprises than Dreams. And making things come true is much more than to ever dream them. Too much because you will also realize when you get there that the experience will often disappoint you. Nothing is as good as we idealize it. But if you feel it’s worth the effort, go for it. Don’t let it die in your dreams. Being involved in filmmaking was my long undervalued dream. And I don’t regret for a minute making it come true – even if it was harder than I ever thought possible.
2. Don’t Underestimate Knowledge – We are always climbing on the shoulders of giants. Learning the hard way is not studying and climbing the ladder step by step. Learning the hard way is falling down the stairs and crashing your head against the wall.
3. Keep It Structured, Stupid – When they say ‘structure, structure, structure’… believe them. A movie is a monstrous relentless machine. If you don’t structure it scrupulously in the script, you’ll pay for it later. Producers don’t buy badly structured scripts for good reason – structures increase control, save money and prevent risks.
4. Your First Act is Your First Fact – Always make sure your First Act is top-notch. Most people in the industry will never bother to read or watch more than the first pages/minutes if they’re not impressed.
5. The Only Easy Day is Yesterday – Remember the SEAL’s motto? It applies to Writing as well. Nothing will ever be easy and you might as well get used to it. Every time you write the best script you’ve ever written it’s still not good enough. Until it is… So don’t give up. Roll with the punches. Keep going.
6. Listen to Producers – This seems counter-intuitive, right? Producers have a knack for ruining scripts. I believe that’s true. (I bet it was the producers who made the wrong decisions in GAME OF THRONES, for instance.) But they also will tell you what they want and many times they are… right. Here are some things I’ve learned from them: a) always have a hot girl in the movie; b) A Xmas story with dogs can be as interesting and as marketable as an action thriller with monsters; c) always have one great ‘watercooler moment’ (a moment people will be commenting over the watercooler on Monday.) d) always go with a High-Concept (see here). Etc, etc.
7. A Good Actor Saying Your Text Is The Greatest Thing You’ll Ever Know – An actor will reveal your text. If it’s a bad text, if it has errors or mistakes, if it doesn’t work – you’ll find out immediately. Seeing a bad actor destroying your scene is not pleasant. Your text is good, but the actor sucks – and most people will say it’s the text, for sure. But when it works… when you have a good actor picking it up and running with it – it’s… a-w-e-s-o-m-e. It will bring tears to your eyes. Even if he/she changes the text to make it livelier and fuller and richer – it’s awesome! You know that feeling you feel when you finish writing your novel, or your script? That feeling of fulfillment? You feel it every single scene, every day, every rehearsal. It’s just awesome!

And these are simply a few of the lessons I got from my experiences in filmmaking. I know there are more and I hope there will be a lot more in the future. See you around the next campfire, fellow warriors.

This is another post prompted by somebody’s question on Facebook. People still get extremely insecure about the darnest things. I keep saying: experiment, experiment, experiment. Try it. See if it works. It takes a lot of time? Of course it does! But if you want to succeed you need to invest your time and creativity. Look at the Italians. In the 1960’s they had a hunger for westerns – people just loved them, maybe because they had good memories of the Americans who’d come for the war of 1940, who knows? But would they wait for the American Film Industry to produce westerns in quantity and quality? No, they didn’t. They did the unthinkable: they made them themselves. Using sometimes American actors brought to the studios of CineCitá, the villages in the Italian countryside and desert of Almeria, they produced dozens of movies of what we now call the Spaghetti Western. Some very good westerns came from that absurd and insane phase of Italian filmmaking, including one of the very best western movies of all time: Sergio Leone’s ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST.  This is one of my favorite movies – in particular, the first 25 minutes of the film are some of my favorite moments in the whole History of Filmmaking. So what was the question somebody asked on Facebook? Of course, it was: How to introduce your characters? ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST does it masterfully. The first four scenes are the introductions of the four main characters and here is how Leone made them memorable – I’m describing them from memory and actually summarizing, so please forgive me if I forget any detail or I’m not completely faithful to the movie.

The movie starts at a Train Station, in the middle of the desert. The wind blows outside and we hear the screech of the water pump’s windmill and the telegraph clicking like a drug-crazed woodpecker. A thin man in a train company’s uniform is working at the desk. The dirty wooden door opens and a hard looking pistolero comes in. The thin man doesn’t like his looks – the thin man is scared. He offers the stranger a ticket for the train. The pistolero carelessly pushes the thin man into a closet and closes the door. He’s not interested in a ticket. Outside, two other men are getting comfortable on opposite sides of the platform. The first man sits on the porch and pushes his hat over his eyes, trying to rest. The second man, by the water trough, is playing with the water. The third man found the shade below the water tower and is surprised by a drop of water falling on his head – he decides to let it drop, and drop, and drop on his hat. The first man hears a fly humming around – he gets troubled by it and finally decides to take action, as he sees the fly landing on the wall he manages to trap in inside the barrel of his gun. He now finds solace in the humming of the trapped fly. The second man is cracking his knuckles, in a creepy way. The third man is still feeling the drops falling on the hat in on his head. Suddenly, the train whistles. It’s arriving. The men get ready. The first pistolero lets the fly go and gets up. The second gets up as well. The third takes his hat to his mouth and drinks the water on top of it. The train arrives. The men wait. But nobody gets out. Somebody throws the mail onto the platform. The train whistles again and starts moving. The pistoleros look at each other and decide whoever they were waiting for has not come in the end, so they start moving towards their horses and… that’s when we hear the harmonica. It’s a loud out-of-tune disturbing sound. The men stop and turn around. The train keeps going and finally gets out of the way. On the other side of the track there’s the figure of Harmonica (played by Charles Bronson). He has his luggage hanging from his right hand and he’s playing the harmonica with his left hand. When he lowers the harmonica he looks intently at the pistoleros. «And Frank?» he asks. The men smile at each other. The first man replies: «Frank sent us.» Harmonica looks behind them. «Did you bring a horse for me?» The men look at the horse and back at him. «It looks like we’re shy one horse,» says the first man. Harmonica shakes his head – «You brought two too many.» We all know what’s going to happen next. It happens in a flash – the pistoleros draw their guns and Harmonica drops his luggage, he has a gun in his right hand, he shoots the three men but the last one manages to shoot back – Harmonica falls. The desert wind goes through the Train Station. Harmonica opens his eyes. He is still alive. And that’s the protagonist’s introduction. You can see it here.

See the technique Leone uses in this scene? He builds the tension through the scenery, the details, by building up supporting characters and small peculiar situations. Those three pistoleros only show up in this scene, but they are still some of the best characters in the whole movie. Leone makes them human and special for us. He takes his time and lets us breathe in the whole situation. As Robert McKee would say, each scene has three acts. The first act of this scene is the introduction of the pistoleros. Then, the second act is the men waiting for the train and deciding to leave. The third act starts with the sound of the harmonica. The introduction of the protagonist happens only at the opening of the third act – and so his introduction is powerful because of the great impact his appearance has on the scene. Leone carefully paints a whole situation and then, late in the scene, he introduces the MC. And that’s brilliant.

Cut to… Next scene. An 8-year-old boy is hunting with his father a few birds for lunch. It is a bare farm in the middle of the desert. They are preparing a party. All three of the man’s children are helping – the young woman is cutting bread slices, the young boy brings the hunted birds and goes to clean himself inside the house. Suddenly, the ever-present cicadas stop their noise. The man and the young woman find it strange – but then the sound comes back. The man and the young woman exchange a few meaningful words. Where is the other young man? «Has Patrick left for the Station?» the man finally asks. The young woman smiles «He’s getting ready, dad.» «Dammit, Patrick!!» shouts the man. The older son comes out running, cleans his boots with a rag and climbs onto the two-horse rig. The man, meanwhile, goes to the well to get fresh water. The cicadas stop singing again. The man and the young woman find it strange again. They see a few birds flying to the sky. The young woman smiles. There’s a shot. The man looks around trying to figure out what is happening. And then he sees the young woman is hit. He calls «Maureen!!» He starts running towards his daughter, but then another shot – he’s hit – he keeps running – a shot, he falls. Then the older son, coming out on the rig, gets shot. The dying man still makes a desperate attempt to get to his revolver, but one last shot kills him.  Cut to: the POV of the 8-year-old running inside the house toward the open door. As he gets out and he is struck by the horrifying image of his whole family dead, the electric guitar music starts. We see the shocked little boy embracing a liquor bottle as he looks at the scene. We are moved by the sheer surprise and anguish in his face. And then, slowly, the killers start appearing from behind the bushes. One man, then two, then three and four. They wait for Frank to come out. Frank (played by the wonderful Henry Fonda) approaches the house. He gives the smoking rifle to one of his men. He looks at the little boy and smiles. The boy and Frank look at each other. Then, off-screen, one of the men asks: «And this one, Frank?» Frank loses his smile – he is annoyed. «Now that you’ve called me by name…» he says. He slowly takes out his revolver, he points at the kid… and he shoots. And that’s the antagonist’s introduction. You can see it here.

Here Leone uses the same technique as before: he paints a whole interesting scene with supporting characters and then, on the third act, he powerfully introduces the Main Character by the cheer impact he has on the situation. In the next scene, he will do a variation of that. He wants to introduce the love-interest, the girl, Jill McBain. He needs a powerful intro, but the scene does not have the same strength of content. Yet, Jill McBain has a symbolic part: she represents Progress coming to the West. So Leone uses that by slowly introducing Progress. Here’s how it plays out:

Act 1: Beautiful Jill McBain (played by Claudia Cardinale) comes out of the train in town. There’s a lot of things happening as all kinds of people with all kinds of American accents come out of the train. However, there is no-one waiting for Jill. She looks around but no-one is there.

Act 2: The Train Station platform is now deserted. The train is quiet on the tracks. Two black boys wait with her, guarding her luggage. She looks at the clock. She finds it strange that no-one appeared for her. She looks at her watch. The lovely voice of a woman with strings starts playing.

Act 3: Finally, Jill decides. She is going to find transportation herself. As the beautiful music goes on, we see her get inside the station followed by the two black boys with her luggage. Through the open window, we see her talk to the station master, probably asking where she can find transportation. She finally leaves the station through the front door and, in a brilliant shot, the camera pans up and the music expands to a climax until, over the roof of the Station, we finally see the whole town bustling with activity. And so, again, Progress is introduced to us in the third act. Jill will get a ride off town and cross with the train works going West. You can see it here.

Still another variation comes on the fourth scene. On her way to the farm, Jill stops at a Bar in the middle of nowhere. The first act is her arrival and her curious conversation with the curious bartender. The whole scenery is picturesque and peculiar, with horses and people drinking and eating in the same space. She asks for a bath and the bartender responds: «We have a tub filled out back and you’re in luck: only three people used it this morning.» Suddenly, at the outset of the second act, here comes the new character: everything stops as we hear a gun battle outside. When it is finished, another main character comes into the bar at the sound of a banjo: the criminal Cheyenne (played by Jason Robards). In the second act, we feel the impact the character has on the whole situation – everyone is paralyzed as he comes in, armed, and asks for someone to help him relieve himself of his chains. In the process, we meet Harmonica again, who’s sitting at the back in the dark. The third act, however, as his gang comes in, the movie really establishes the importance of Cheyenne: he interacts with Harmonica and we understand that it’s their relationship that matters. Harmonica looks at the characteristic dusters of the gang and says to him: «A while back I saw three of these dusters. Inside the dusters, there were three men. Inside the men, there were three bullets.» And Cheyenne replies: «That’s a crazy story, Harmonica. Around these parts, only Cheyenne’s men have the guts to use these dusters. And Cheyenne’s men don’t get killed.» You can take a look at the scene here.

So Leone introduces these four characters by maximizing the impact they have of a certain situation, or by maximizing the symbolism, laying out the scene and building it up before the pay-off of the character’s appearance. You can see they usually don’t show up on the first act of the scene but only on the second or even the third act. Leone is a master of these types of introductions. I would highly recommend you look at how he does it if you’re struggling with introducing characters. And that’s the end of this long post. Hope you liked it. See you around the next campfire, amigos.

When I was younger I used to teach teen boys in underprivileged neighborhoods. I remember riding in a car with a couple of these youths who told me that their dream was to ‘one day kidnap Jennifer Lopez, rape her senseless and ransom her for a million dollars’ so they could buy fast cars. In hindsight, I guess I could find it funny that they would ask so little ransom for Jennifer Lopez, but at the time all I felt was disappointment: how could they aim so low and yet so high? How could they dream they could reach Jennifer Lopez and still feel that there was no other way to be happy in life but to commit a horrible crime and have a lot of money for a short amount of time? But I’ve learned that many people in this world do feel that the best things in life are out of their reach. And some that believe that if not by breaking the law, they will never get what they want. That is maybe why many of us enjoy crime stories, heist stories, and those old gangster movies with James Cagney and Humphrey Bogart – it doesn’t matter if they died in the end, they had the money, the respect, the freedom, and the girl for a while.

The same for Coppola’s THE GODFATHER. The series first two movies are some of the best movies ever made. I’ve seen them again recently and they always blow my mind. Now, I’ve talked about Blake Snyder’s SAVE THE CAT book several times already – it’s one of the best books on writing I ever read. One of the first things Snyder writes about is of the ‘Save the Cat’ effect. I’ve already described it before, it goes somewhat like this: imagine a dirty junkie murderous cop on a stakeout at the beginning of the movie. That’s your protagonist. He’s staking out a Mob jewelry store he’ll rob further along. At this point, we have everything to think that this is a bad guy. He’s unlikable. But then, while he’s staking out the place, he sees an old lady trying to get her kitten down from a tree. She’s already close to tears. So, jeopardizing his plans, the cop gets out from the car and goes help the old lady getting the cat off the tree. Suddenly, we will like this guy. We will identify with him. We ‘saved the cat’, we saved the protagonist. Inside this vile man, there’s something of Good. He doesn’t only think of himself. If there’s nothing good in a character, Snyder tells us, we will be unable to identify with him/her.

That’s the first scene of THE GODFATHER in a nutshell: a man, an undertaker, is asking for Vito Corleone to help him get justice for his daughter. He looks at The Godfather with reverence and tells a sad tale of disrespect for his daughter who was abused in some manner. Don Corleone (Marlon Brando), in a fatherly way, concedes his help. There: the ‘cat’ is saved. Vito is a good guy (in fact, if I recall, the Italian Mafia itself did approve the script beforehand – saying it was respectful).  Later, the film will do the same to Michael Corleone (played by Al Pacino): he’s a college graduate, a war veteran, who loves his family and is tender to his women. They are the good guys. They are the good gangsters. They go against the bad guys: the greedy rivals who want to start moving drugs into the neighborhood. They will have to fight against these attackers and survive. Some will not survive.

And so we rejoice when Michael chooses to save his father and murder in cold blood a police captain and a rival gangster at a restaurant. And we feel vindicated when he is able to outsmart and murder the leaders of the Five Families at the end of the first movie. We do not judge him. We’re glad he won. Even if Francis Ford Coppola is able to subtly reveal to us the corruption growing in the man, ‘asphyxiating the cat’ as he shows us Michael claiming to renounce Satan at the christening of his nephew while the murders he ordered are occurring, and Michael bluntly lying to his wife and sister as the movie closes.

Also, there are no innocent people being hurt in the movie (with one exception: Michael’s first wife). It almost seems that those cold-blooded gangsters would hurt no-one else but themselves. More: there’s no police. Almost as if the Law couldn’t touch them. The closest they got was when Michael Corleone is brought in front of the Congress in the second movie. And, as Kay (Diane Keaton) would say: ‘I suppose I always knew you were too smart to let any of them beat you’. We take home some sense of vindication from this feeling: Michael Corleone always wins. But at what price? The second movie goes even further: as he defends his Cosa Nostra, his family, he loses his family. His actions lead him to lose his wife, his unborn son, his friends, the brother he ultimately kills. He actively destroys what he tries to protect – ending up protecting only one thing: his father’s work/ghost, even though all his father ever wanted was to protect the family.

Now, I believe that what still fascinates many people in the figure of Donald Trump is the same phenomenon. His story is relatable. Not the millionaire playboy draft-dodger pornstar-banger story, but the ‘rebel dumbass who became President’ story. It’s the childish dream my teen students were having: breaking all the rules, getting the girls and the money, and still win. It’s the same allure as in the Corleone’s story: he is a criminal who can ignore moral codes and rules in general and still win. The big difference is: we fantasize with those icons as we watch movies and TV and read books. That’s what fiction is there for: so you can live your fantasies without bringing them to reality – because fantasies can be outrageous and have disastrous consequences when acted upon. Like cheating on your wife or banging your knock-out daughter.

Most crimes actually hurt other people. They can destroy lives. Many lives. That is why they are crimes. And they should not be tolerated, ignored, frowned upon, excused. If there is a Michael Corleone in real life, murdering, stealing and plotting without consequence, authorities must do everything in their power to bring him to justice – don’t we all agree with that?

Now, in recent History, there were two US Presidents who were under an Impeachment Process. One used the Executive powers to spy on other Americans and then tried to cover it up. The CIA and the Intelligence Community were actively used to spy on the opposition, and then there was obstruction of justice. I guess it is obvious that this is an impeachable offense to most people.  It was for President Nixon himself, as he resigned before being thrown out. The other President under impeachment had cheated on his wife and lied to cover it up. Should one lose his job over that? Not really sure.

The current US President, however, did the same: he cheated on his wife and lied and broke the law to cover it up – there are people in jail right now because they helped him do that. And there’s proof the Russians illegally interfered in the US Elections, and evidence his campaign officials were connected with these Russians (over 120 meetings without a clear reason with Russian spies, officials and civilians). There are people in jail right now for being connected with this effort and several Russian individuals and organizations indicted for illegal activity on this front. And he has once and again benefited Russian with his diplomatic actions – including, among other things, revealing Israeli secret information to Russian Intelligence officers in the Oval Office, dumping sanctions on Russian oligarchs and lobbying for Russian presence in international organizations. And we know he obstructed justice to cover this up. He fired the FBI Director to stop the Bureau’s investigation on these illegal activities – he confessed as much on national television. He ordered Special Counsel Robert Mueller to be fired as well for the same reason. There are 10 other instances of obstruction of justice documented and reported on the same subject. He ordered several officials to not-testify before Congress as he was afraid they would help prove wrongdoing – more obstruction. And we know he has been profiting from his Office as he hasn’t divested from his businesses – and foreign officials pay to stay in his hotels when they come to meet him. And we suspect there are many more illegal activities hidden in his Tax Returns he is doing everything not to release – besides all the dark stuff being investigated about his Inauguration activities. And this is a very brief summary on an incredible array of instances of criminal activity that are suspected or already clear.

At what point will Americans realize that this President has done already much worse than the other two impeached Presidents combined? At what point will Americans realize that this is Reality, not Fiction? And that looking at a criminal kingpin with sympathy has consequences? Not marriage consequences or mere internal politics consequences but National Security and Geopolitical consequences. At what points will Americans realize that many people are and will be hurt by his gangster actions? At what point will this story stop being like a gangster movie where the police are not present and are ineffective to countermand Crime? At what point will Americans stop acting as if they were repressed despaired teenagers investing in loser dreams and fantasies?

Obviously, there is no point in ‘impeaching’ Al Pacino, or his character Michael Corleone: their actions are fictional actions – we can identify with them without losing our souls. But it is obvious that Donald Trump must be impeached. His toxic presidency must end. His actions are very real and criminal and dangerous. This should be obvious to everyone.

I often see in online groups and even offline a few people asking for partners to co-write a story with. Most of these callings I find laughable. Why would anyone write somebody else’s story? Isn’t the whole point being able to write your own story? Giving life to your own characters and ventilating your own fantasies? Still, I can tell you with all honesty that writing with others can be a wonderful and fulfilling experience.  So I would like to speak a little bit about that.

I was actually writing with somebody else much sooner than I was writing at all. If you read some of my posts, like this one, you will know that my first bouts of inspiration happened when I was very young and was playing with my brother. We would build our own stories and our own characters and play out the battles and the pursuits we were imagining. After that, I started writing my own stories and I would not share this process until many years later. On a few occasions, I happened to engage with other writers in a sort of cadavre exquis exercise: one of those where someone starts to write a story and then somebody else continues it and passes to a third person and so on – so in the end, you have a story written by many parties. I even did that in Torino, Italy, when I was representing my country in the Bi-Annual Fair of Young Creators of Europe and the Mediterranean in ‘97 – us writers ended up reading the whole strange text on stage for an audience with music and everything; it was very interesting. These exercises, though, even if interesting, never ended up creating a good story or even a good narrative. And there was always someone who made the whole text even weirder one way or the other – making a strange poem instead of narrating, or a deus ex machina of some sort. And it was obvious it would be so, as people write a lot with their feelings, their own style, their ideas, and never quite ‘fit’ into another person just like that.

For years I never thought I’d have the time to write with other people. I wanted to write my own stuff – imagine my own stories, fly with my characters, write as I pleased. How would I have the time to develop stories with other people when I had so many of my own to work with? That changed, however, when I started writing screenplays.

Scriptwriting is probably the most technical kind of fiction writing there is. Everything you do in a script is full of consequences for a lot of people. For instance, if you write a scene where two people are having a conversation in a car as they cross the Golden Gate bridge you must really have a very good reason for that, or it will never be made – no-one will close or simulate the Golden Gate bridge for a movie scene where two people just talk to each other, it’s just crazy expensive. And everything in a script must be in its right place – if you’re writing a sit-com, be sure to have a joke every other minute. Everything you do, every scene, every detail, has loads of consequences for the producers, for the director and the photography and the wardrobe and the actors, etc. So… it’s technical. Curiously enough, that makes it easier to co-write: because your writing style and your ‘feelings’ about this or that matter less.

Also, you can do an outline or not when you are writing a book, but when you’re screenwriting, fuggedaboudit!, you need to outline, period. So I was in my late 20’s when I had my first real experience with co-writing. And it was a lot of fun! A friend of mine and I decided to write a romantic comedy and we worked several hours every Monday night on it. When you’re outlining with a friend, especially comedy, it’s a blast. You can have hours and hours brainstorming about funny things and building the characters and the story from scratch. And then you can start writing it scene by scene and it’s even funnier and more joyful. And then you can invite a group of friends over and make a reading of the script and laugh and drink and then commiserate together for having written a lousy script. Oh, the good ol’ times.

I ended up doing a lot more of that later on, especially after my 40^th birthday as I was invited to co-write a script that was produced and then invited to do more stuff in co-writing. I had a lot of good experiences screenwriting with somebody else or even in a group. I think that in some cases it’s really the best thing to do – and it presses you to write more and faster and with more quality. It’s a really good experience. But it can also be frustrating. And I am very skeptical about partnerships in writing books, even though there seems to be a lot of them that actually work. This said, I think some things should happen for a writing partnership to succeed.

First of all, I don’t believe you can simply invite a random person, a random writer, to write with you. I don’t believe you can simply go online and ask somebody to write with you. The chances of that being rewarding seem to me very thin. A co-writer must be someone you connect with, someone you trust and, hopefully, someone you really know. Both minds and hearts must be able to integrate the others. Because, don’t forget, when you write fiction you are giving life to your fantasies. It’s only natural that the other person’s fantasies are different – but they must be compatible. You must both be able to get a kick from the same story. Hopefully, you should like the same kinds of stories and the same genres. Maybe even have the same references. You should also be keen to outline. Outlining is the easiest, most engaging and most crucial part of a writing partnership, in my experience.  Only when you have completely agreed on what the story will be, in my view, will you be ready to write. And you must have the same work ethic – it’s important that neither one feels cheated, working harder than the other – or there will be complications.

Second, it’s not easy when someone comes up with the story and one of you comes in to help write it. I was once hired by a film producer to help a director develop a script he was writing and I almost went mad when the guy started every single session by announcing he had changed the names of the main characters. Aaarrgggh!! My best experiences co-writing were the ones where both of us built the story together and owned the story together.

Thirdly, be able to compromise upwards. What do I mean by that? A rule of thumb I had with a director I worked for years was: we only committed to a plot point or an important item in the story when both of us fully agreed with it. If one of us was not sure, we kept working to find a better solution. Compromise upwards – compromise to get the best possible solution. Don’t compromise downwards, accepting something you don’t really like – it will most likely bite you in the behind going forwards or, at least, will diminish the pleasure and the stamina in the process and the work.

Fourth, the three pillars of person-to-person communication are essential. These are: 1)Active Listening – always try to listen carefully, willingly and actively to your partner – really understand what he/she is saying, not just the words but the meaning. 2)Empathy – always put yourself in his/her shoes and go to the core of what he/she is communicating; put yourself in the character’s shoes as well and promote that positioning with your partner, role-play if necessary. 3) Assertiveness – be able to convey as clearly as you can what you really think – don’t be passive or submissive, don’t be aggressive, don’t manipulate – tell it as it is in a way the other person is able to hear and integrate. If you don’t do this it is likely the communication will break sooner or later and all the work will be worthless.

So there… These are my two cents on this subject. I guess many times people will be in a position where it is not possible to have all the best conditions met: if you are part of a writer’s room for a TV-series or if you were hired by someone to co-write or ghost-write a book you may not have the say I profess. Still, I hope this text and these ideas are useful and can help you develop good partnerships. See you around the next campfire, fellow warriors.

When I trained Fencing and Martial Arts in my youth I was struck by the fact that novices and masters seemed to choose their techniques in a different way. Novices seemed to be more deliberate and when they went for a technique they struggled to do the move correctly, just as they were taught. Masters, however, seemed to be more fluid and spontaneous. I learned that masters did techniques in order to breathe correctly so that everything happened naturally. Novices, however, tried to breathe into the technique, forcing themselves to breathe in a manner that allowed for a good technique to happen. You can see the same thing in football, for instance. When you see someone like Cristiano Ronaldo or Lionel Messi playing, they seem fluid and you can pick up that they use different techniques in order to go in a particular direction or be in a position to strike. They don’t even seem to think about the techniques they use. Maybe they don’t even realize the techniques they use. (Btw, Portugal just won the 1st UEFA League of Nations Cup – kudos to us.)

Let me give you a writing example. When I was a kid I was enthralled by a particular sentence I wrote. It was something like this (loose translation): ‘The Moon was up on high, a comma of false modesty, hidden but interested.’ I just thought this was the most beautiful sentence I would ever write. It was a clever sentence, as I was describing the crescent moon. It seemed like a comma, falsely modest because it was mostly hidden in the shade but still very beautiful, and it was hidden but looked like it was slightly popping out of the hiding place to look at us. Clever… I still think it was a very good use of a metaphor. But I believe nowadays I write these kinds of sentences and use this technique all the time, without even noticing it. I don’t use it to make a beautiful metaphor or a beautiful sentence – I use it to lead the reader to a specific position and feeling. And that’s all I care about.

But that doesn’t mean I’m not always learning new techniques or new ways of doing this or that. Take a look at this dialogue by Hemingway I talked about here. It’s from ‘A FAREWELL TO ARMS’:

(The leading couple is in bed. The protagonist is trying to convince his girl to marry him – she refuses.)

(…) ‘I am married. I’m married to you. Don’t I make a good wife?’

‘You’re a lovely wife.’

‘You see, darling, I had one experience of waiting to be married.’

‘I don’t want to hear about it.’

‘You know I don’t love anyone but you. You shouldn’t mind because someone else loved me.’

‘I do.’

‘You shouldn’t be jealous of some one who’s dead when you have everything.’

‘No, but I don’t want to hear about it.’

‘Poor darling. And I know you’ve been with all kinds of girls and it doesn’t matter to me.’

‘Couldn’t we be married privately some way?’

Hemingway is using a technique some call ‘Talking Heads’ – he ignores the scenery and physical aspects of the scene and just writes dialogue from one character to the other. It’s a tricky technique, as I explained here, because if it’s not done well it will confuse and annoy the reader. But I like it a lot because it’s very cinematic (curiously enough) and expects the readers to be intelligent and fill in the blanks. Now recently I read one of THE WITCHER’s novels by Andrzej Sapkowski and he uses the technique all the time. But he goes a step further. Here’s a scene by a master teaching his young pupil to fight:

‘Beautiful! Now jump away, jump away immediately, pirouette! I could have a dagger in my left hand! Good! Very good! And now, Ciri? What am I going to do now?’

‘How am I to know?’

‘Watch my feet! How is my body weight distributed? What can I do from my position?’

‘Anything!’

‘So spin, spin, force me to open up! Defend yourself! Good! And again! Good! And again!

‘Owwww!’

‘Not so good.’

‘Uff… What did I do wrong?’

‘Nothing. I’m just faster.’

See what Sapkowski does there? He almost writes in the second person POV. It’s an action sequence but he doesn’t describe any of the movements except… through dialogue. You’re following the action through the dialogue. In my view, that’s taking the Talking Heads technique to another level. I love it! I’d never seen this technique used like this!

Actually, the implicit question in the title is a wrong one. You never ‘don’t use’ techniques. Every time you are writing you are using techniques, whether you know it or not. And it’s good to know about them because you will then notice them in other writer’s texts and you can consciously experiment and develop your portfolio, your tool-kit, and your writing. I believe we writers must be able to learn from one-another and reading is absolutely necessary for this.

But having a tool-kit, knowing techniques, must improve your options, not restrict them. Different techniques give you alternatives and new solutions for this or that situation you face. It’s not indoctrination. You should be very wary of people who tell you: you should do this and not do that. ‘Protagonists must be this way or that way. Chapters should be this way or that way. Stories must be like this, genres should be like that. Don’t do metaphors like this, make your sentences like that.’ That’s all bullshit in my view. Original writing, writing that is truly interesting, comes from experimenting, from making mistakes, from doing things people haven’t done before – or did it worse. Also, don’t go asking those kinds of questions: ‘should I start my story this way or that way? Is it wrong to use first person POV in a comedy? What if I describe a fight through dialogue, is it okay? Can I do Talking Heads or is it bad?’ These questions should not take place! Seriously! Just do it. See what happens. Then ask your readers to give opinions. But you will never be original if you write ‘by the pole-numbers’.

My mother taught me this story as a child, of a man trying to paint his house. Every person who walked by had a different opinion about the color he was using and every time he accepted the other’s opinion and changed the color he was painting with. Of course, he never finished painting the house. We must accept that we will never please everybody and that there is no perfect way of writing a story. And that’s the beauty of it. It’s an Art, not a Science! It’s not about being able to repeat the experiment; it’s about experimenting in novel ways.

Now, not everything that is original is good. There was this screenwriting agent I once met who told me that ‘when people come and tell me that this hasn’t been done before, I usually find a good reason for not having been done before.’ Originality is not just about being different. Most of Creativity is actually Creative Problem-Solving. It’s about solving problems in a creative way. It doesn’t happen in a vacuum. You need to analyze the problem and invent a new solution. But you can do Level One changes – solving a problem in a completely different way; or Level Two changes – solving a problem by improving past solutions. Both are possible and both are desirable, as long as the problem gets solved effectively – and doing that with Level One change, i.e. inventing new techniques, is much more difficult and time-consuming. You can always do Level Two: learn a lot of techniques and use them in original ways – i.e. having a well-furnished tool-kit.

At least that’s my take on the subject. I hope it makes sense to you. See you around the next campfire, fellow knights.

 

They say a writer never has a vacation and that’s the truth. A writer is always writing or thinking about writing. A story is always looming somewhere within the tortuous meanders of a writer’s mind. Throughout the years I started using a few tools I picked up here and there to help me deal with this continuous effort, or rather this continuous energy. These diverse tools have been useful to me in many ways and some of them are actually a lot simpler than you may think. Many writers I know actually use many of them, even if they call them something different, and they are commonly used beyond professional writing. I bet you are using some of them, whether you know it or not. Still, I thought it would be interesting to talk a little bit about at least three of them, so here they go. The order is not meaningful, as you may have learned by other lists of mine.

1. THE NOTEBOOK

The common notebook is probably the most obvious tool. Every writer has his/her notebook whether they know it or not. You can use your phone, your recorder, your web camera, your computer, your IPad, whatever. Every writer has a tool to take notes. It’s essential! Maybe you use it to write in a coffee shop or on the train, maybe you use it to draw your characters or your scenery – it’s still a notebook. I use several forms of it. I usually have an XL sheet I’ve already spoken about here. I use it to gather concepts and gimmicks. These will help me always to have a story to write, and focus on the story I’m working on without getting infatuated by another idea that comes along. Once the concept or gimmick is settled on my XL sheet, I forget about it until it’s time to work on it for real. I have over 40 unwritten concepts on this sheet right now.

I also have a Word document dedicated to each story I’m writing. It’s not a document where I write the story itself, it’s a file where I write character traits, random ideas I have about that story, or even write future scenes or pieces of scenes that I will copy and paste into the narrative when the time comes. The Word document for my current WIP is now over 17 pages long and has the curious and coincidental name of «2030», which is the first line written on it and documents the year the story is supposed to happen in. Many of the things on these pages are now obsolete, but I never change my ‘notebook doc’, I just keep writing on it, because I may want to return to a strange unused idea at some moment or want to understand the origins of another idea, which brings me back to the notes on the doc. This is, for me, a very important document, almost as valuable as the actual document where the story is being weaved.

And then, there are actual notebooks. Notebooks everywhere. The most important of these is the one that I keep next to my bed with its pencil. Many of my ideas come to me in my sleep. However, it is rare for an adult to remember his/her dreams… except for the first 5 minutes after we wake up. So that is the moment when ideas must be immediately stored. Many times we are too sleepy to make any sense and it’s not uncommon for me to get up in the morning and not understand a word I have written in that book. Still, that single notebook has saved many jewels from oblivion and that is certain. It also works as a weapon against insomnia. Many times I can’t sleep because an idea is plaguing my mind, exciting me and troubling me. Once I write down the main pillars of it, however, I feel at ease and sleep comes to me quite quickly. So I’m really grateful for that notebook.

Beyond these, I always (almost always) carry a notebook and a pen with me. You never know when you’ll need one, and I actually have notes spread out everywhere – unfortunately, as I lose many of them.

2. THE BOARD

If you’ve been reading my blog you already know I’m a fan of Blake Snyder’s Beat Sheet. Well, in his book SAVE THE CAT, Snyder also talks about a tool many writers, especially screenwriters, use to organize their work. They call it The Board. The Board is basically a lay down of the structure of the story. Some people use a cork board, some cards, and some pins; some people use specially written software or a smartphone app. I sometimes use an XL sheet with squares and text boxes I spread over a 3 Act division. The Board allows you to keep the whole story overview in one place and to keep adding to it, changing plot points from place to place and interlocking ideas in one way or another before you write them. Take a look at this post about it from Isaac Botkin – he explains it well.

Sometimes I also have the Board written down on a Word document, and I even have a template I made with Snyder’s beats listed when I want to check out if the plot points of the story are in the right place. But most of the time I have The Board in the most elusive and dangerous place: my mind. I do not recommend you do this, seriously. I do it because I was doing it for a long time before I even knew what The Board was – and it’s half the pleasure I get from writing: visualizing and playing with the structure in my mind. If I ever forget this or that idea I find it means it wasn’t that important or that good – otherwise I don’t forget it. And most of the times I wrote down or put down The Board I learned I didn’t need to do it. I had it all in my mind. If it’s a story I will not be working on at the moment, I’ll write down the fundamentals on a Word document and then I’ll commit to The Board I’m working on. What’s important is that at any moment I can change the pieces from one place to another and make sense of the whole structure in a single glance. Use a real Board, seriously. Put your story down in words, put it on the wall. I bet I’ll be doing that myself soon, as my age pressures my mind.

3. MIND-MAPS

Mind-mapping is a technique I picked up a long time ago when I was working on Time Management and Presentation Skills. It’s a technique invented by an Australian called Tony Buzan who was studying the way people study. He became an expert on the brain and on memory and speed-reading. The theory behind mind-maps refers that it works by replicating the way our inner brain works. Using images and a fluid design we can organize ourselves as we open our minds. I’m not going to recommend a particular site on the subject, just google it. There is tons of stuff on mind-mapping. I use it for everything. When I have an idea and want to develop it, when I’m on my lunch break and want to structure my latest blog post, when I have a meeting and want to have my ideas organized, when I have story in my mind and want to lay it down simply on one page, I pick up a notebook and mind-map. A few years ago I was on a conference sitting behind a well-known author whose name I won’t mention and I took a peek at what he was doing on his tablet and, surprise-surprise, he was mind-mapping a story. That was so cool! His Board was a Mind-Map!

So these are a few of the tools I’ve been using for years on my writing. Do you use them too? Do they make sense to you? Tell me all about it.