CAPTAIN MARVEL may or may not be a great movie–we won’t know until 2019–but the first trailer is great. Take a look, then we’ll chat about why it works.
Let’s talk about two reasons why this works before we get to the third reason, the biggest deal.
Good Move Number 1: A tight focus on introducing us to a new hero
I’m a pretty good Everyman when it comes to superhero movies. People know who Batman, Wonder Woman, Iron Man and Spiderman are. You don’t need to spend any time introducing them in a trailer.
Average people do NOT know who Captain Marvel is, and when you want to sell a billion dollars worth of movie tickets, you need to introduce people to that character.
This trailer does a great job of giving us a first look at Captain Marvel.
Not her powers. Not her entire life story. There’s still a lot of mystery and unanswered questions, which is great. But you get a feel for her.
Other trailers tend to focus on the villain, which I usually a good move. Villains are inherently more interesting. Villains rule, heroes drool.
In this case, they were smart to keep the camera on Captain Marvel.
Good Move Number 2: Nice little cameos, but no surplus of sidekicks and love interests
Sidekicks and love interests can crowd out a hero, especially in a trailer.
This is a particular problem in superhero movies, where the first movie almost always has the hero’s origin story PLUS the best villain, to make sure the movie doesn’t bomb and there’s a sequel. And yes, there’s always a love interest and a sidekick.
Then the second movie has TWO villains and a new sidekick or three, plus a different love interest.
The third movie has THREE villains, I kid you not, before the series collapses and the studio reboots the whole mess. This happened with the first Spiderman series, Batman, you name it. It’s an epidemic.
So putting sidekicks, love interests and the villain’s henchmen in a trailer is always an achy breaky big mistakey. Stick to the hero, or the villain–or the hero and the villain.
This trailer keeps the cameos nice and short. Samuel L. Jackson with hair and two eyes! Agent Coulson!
Good Move Number 3: This trailer is a proper tease
Bad movie trailers either (a) confuse you or (b) give away the entire plot of the movie.
Here, have a look:
Great trailers tease you the right way.
They ask narrative questions without answering them, making you curious. What happens?
And this trailer made me curious.
How did she get her powers, and what can she do with them? Why did she fall to Earth? Who are the bad guys, and what do they want?
VERDICT:
Like 99 percent of the population, I knew absolutely nothing about the character of Captain Marvel, and this first movie trailer did the job of introducing her and making me curious. Nicely done.
Songs for kids like BABY SHARK can be relentlessly repetitive and deceptively deep, if you dig deep enough–or stay up all night writing a term paper about Nietzsche, who is harder to spell than understand.
BABY SHARK is a perfect example of this, a peppy, wholesome song viewed billions of times, and this is perhaps the first time I mean “billions” literally, since I usually say something like “2.84 bazillions” as a joke on the internets. No. People have watched and listened to versions of BABY SHARK more than a billion times.
Have a listen to the original, and if you’re feeling masochistic, or have a tiny one in your secret fortress, go ahead and watch the dance version, too.
Then we’ll dissect every line of lyrics through the eyes of a grown-up who understands the joke behind the Nihilist Arby’s twitter account. (What makes me an expert? I dissect music videos, movies and books on this silly blog. I also watched 5,823 hours of The Wiggles, Thomas the Trains and the Teletubbies when our pookie was small. Come at me, bro.)
Baby Shark doo doo, doo doo doo doo
(Small Shark, you are small now, like the small humans singing this song, doom doom, doom doom doom doom)
Baby Shark doo doo, doo doo doo doo
(But little shark, you will eat and grow big, just as the tiny humans will grow, doom doom, doom doom doom doom)
Baby Shark doo doo, doo doo doo doo
(Big enough to become the feared apex predator of the ocean, doom doom, doom doom doom doom)
Baby Shark
(So all hail the baby shark, future king of the seas, and the tiny humans, future lords of the land)
Mummy Shark doo doo, doo doo doo doo
(Mother Sharks are loving and wise, except when they tear into a school of tuna with their razor teeth, doom doom, doom doom doom doom)
Mummy Shark doo doo, doo doo doo doo
(Mother Sharks are strong and powerful, and can take away our iPhones when we are bad, doom doom, doom doom doom doom)
Mummy Shark doo doo, doo doo doo doo
(We thank you for not eating us, which you could easily do, doom doom, doom doom doom doom)
Mummy Shark
(All hail the Mother Sharks)
Daddy Shark doo doo, doo doo doo doo
(Father Sharks are the largest and scariest of them all, doom doom, doom doom doom doom)
Daddy Shark doo doo, doo doo doo doo
(Father Sharks can seem unreadable and mysterious, doom doom, doom doom doom doom)
Daddy Shark doo doo, doo doo doo doo
(Baby Sharks recognize the size and power of the Fathers, doom doom, doom doom doom doom)
Daddy Shark
(We also hope to grow as big, strong and silent as Father Shark, like Clint Eastwood in a Spaghetti western, though this will not happen if you eat us when there are no tuna around)
Grandma Shark doo doo, doo doo doo doo
(Grandma Sharks are still big but not scary at all, doom doom, doom doom doom doom)
Grandma Shark doo doo, doo doo doo doo
(Their age and infirmity is a sign that death comes for us all, doom doom, doom doom doom doom)
Grandma Shark doo doo, doo doo doo doo
(So their time with us is limited and precious, doom doom, doom doom doom doom)
Grandma Shark
(We love you, Grandma Shark)
Grandpa Shark doo doo, doo doo doo doo
(Grandpa Shark is no longer a threatening predator, doom doom, doom doom doom doom)
Grandpa Shark doo doo, doo doo doo doo
(Like Grandma Shark, he is loving and kind, and spends his limited time on us, doom doom, doom doom doom doom))
Grandpa Shark doo doo, doo doo doo doo
(Possibly because there is no Shark Golf Channel, doom doom, doom doom doom doom)
Grandpa Shark
(You’re a lovable goofball, Grandpa Shark)
Let’s go hunt doo doo, doo doo doo doo
(Though we are small, we know that we must learn to be predators, doom doom, doom doom doom doom)
Let’s go hunt doo doo, doo doo doo doo
(As it is in the ocean, it is on land, doom doom, doom doom doom doom)
Let’s go hunt doo doo, doo doo doo doo
(The little fish gets eaten by the bigger fish, who gets munched by the biggest shark, doom doom, doom doom doom doom)
Let’s go hunt
(This is the real food pyramid, with predators on top, and thankfully we are predators)
Run away doo doo, doo doo doo doo
(But for right now, we are still small, and prey for anything larger, doom doom, doom doom doom doom)
Run away doo doo, doo doo doo doo
(We can’t stand and fight, doom doom, doom doom doom doom)
Run away doo doo, doo doo doo doo
(Running is our only option, which is why young animals of all sorts chase each other, doom doom, doom doom doom doom)
Run away
(Running isn’t just a game, it’s essential practice for survival, doom doom, doom doom doom doom)
Safe at last doo doo, doo doo doo doo
(Running and hiding can protect you, doom doom, doom doom doom doom)
Safe at last doo doo, doo doo doo doo
(But not forever, doom doom, doom doom doom doom)
Safe at last doo doo, doo doo doo doo
(Eventually, you need to grow big enough to chase and eat not just prey, but your competition, doom doom, doom doom doom doom)
Safe at last
(Safety is temporary and elusive)
It’s the end doo doo, doo doo doo doo
(There are beginnings, middles and ends, doom doom, doom doom doom doom)
It’s the end doo doo, doo doo doo doo
(We are all Baby Sharks, then Daddy Shark and Grandpa Shark–or Mommy Shark and Grandma Shark, you get the idea, doom doom, doom doom doom doom)
It’s the end doo doo, doo doo doo doo
(And our existences will end, as everything must, doom doom, doom doom doom doom)
OK. Now we get all serious. Because I am using the lyrics to a country song, and I’m not making fun of it, despite my severe twang allergy.
Good music — and good writing — have the same patterns. Songs start slow, build up, bridge to the chorus, return to the melody and build to a crescendo. They bring the audience on a journey.
The greatest guitarist in the world would bore you into a coma if he repeated the same riffs.
Variety is good.
Repetition can be powerfully boring, or powerfully good, depending on how you use it. If you do use repetition, it must have a purpose.
Country songs like this are great study for writers. Why? Not because they’re all sad songs where your pickup truck died, your wife left you for your best friend and your dog hates you. They’re useful because country songs tell a story in about 200 words, a story you can understand and dissect. I can point out the setups and payoffs. You can see the heroes and villains, the reversals and the climax.
By contrast, most pop songs feature lyrics that don’t have any real structure or story.
Also, you can hear and understand country lyrics without a cheat sheet.
Three other good examples of country songs with great lyrics and minimal twang, if you are also allergic like me: LOVE STORY by Taylor Swift, Traveling Soldier by the Dixie Chicks and damn near anything by Lady Antebellum, who are flipping brilliant.
No matter what you write–novels or newspaper stories, screenplays or speeches–it’s worth remembering that writing needs to be like music. You need an interesting intro, a melody, a chorus and a crescendo. You need variety AND repetition.
So: watch this cheesy home-made music video. Listen to the lyrics, and read them on your magical screen that shows you words and moving pictures from anywhere on the planet.
See how Bucky the Covington has clear setups and payoff, and how he cleverly, and beautifully, uses repetition with a purpose.
The words in the chorus change slightly each time, yet the meaning is quite different. And while the writing itself is a tad clunky, my God, the structure, it is glorious. My only wish is that I owned a cowboy hat so I could take it off and salute you, Bucky.
I’LL WALK by Bucky Covington
We were 18, it was prom night.
We had our first big fight.
She said, Pull this car over.
I did and then I told her, I don’t know what you are crying for.
I grabbed her hand, as she reached for the door.
She said …
I’ll walk.
Let go of my hand.
Right now I’m hurt, and you don’t understand.
So just be quiet.
And later we will talk.
Just leave, don’t worry.
I’ll walk.
It was a dark night, a black dress.
Driver never saw her, around the bend.
I never will forget the call,
or driving to the hospital,
when they told me her legs still wouldn’t move.
I cried, when I walked into her room.
She said …
I’ll walk.
Please come and hold my hand.
Right now I’m hurt, and I don’t understand.
Lets just be quiet, and later we can talk.
Please stay, don’t worry.
I’ll walk.
I held her hand through everything.
The weeks and months of therapy.
And I held her hand and asked her to be my bride.
She’s dreamed from a little girl,
to have her daddy bring her down the isle.
So from her wheelchair, she looks up to him and smiles.
And says …
I’ll walk.
Please hold my hand.
I know that this will hurt, I know you understand.
Here’s the thing about Survival Lilly–she gets right to it, unlike other YouTubers who seem to think they’re required by law to stand in front of the camera and yak for 10 minutes before they do a SINGLE THING, then chat you up for another five minutes about that solitary thing they did, whereas Lilly just goes bam and starts building a survival shelter.
Lilly doesn’t waste your time. She shows you smart, practical things that don’t require a ton of time, gear or expertise.
Her entire YouTube channel is an apocalyptic gold mine. If you’re into prepping a little or a lot, or simply enjoy zombie movies and dystopian goodness, check her out.
Listen: the best place to do testing is where it doesn’t really matter, and that includes experiments on social media platforms like WordPress and Twitter
This silly blog is a good example of that.
So let’s talk, you and I, about what’s works, what doesn’t and what we all can learn.
Lesson 1: Start small
When you first start a blog, or hop onto a social media platform like Twitter, there’s no guarantee that you’ll (a) like it, (b) become good at it, (c) the thing won’t go bankrupt or (d) it may get bought by Apple, Google or Microsoft and get folded into some other app.
Whatever you try on social media, it’s good to start small.
I started this blog to sell a car. Seriously. Didn’t know a craigslist ad disappeared after a couple weeks or whatever and the ad needed a free home. My genius sister said “WordPress, fool” and that ad went viral.
Doing a premium account from the start would’ve been a mistake.
I had to learn WordPress for a while before moving to a premium account and messing around with themes and such.
Same with Twitter and Facebook.
Start with a free account whenever you can and explore it fully before doing more.
Doing posts about books, movies and zombies truly helped me get good enough at WordPress to make new sites for other stuff, things that mattered, without a lot of sweat. And sure, after a while, go deeper. Just don’t try to learn how to swim in the deep end of the pool. Won’t work out.
Lesson 2: Try all kinds of things, relentlessly and constantly
There’s a ton of conflicting advice out there about any topic today. That includes social media.
Check them all out, then try out all kinds of things.
Just don’t think that once you figure out a process, you’re good to go for years.
The Series of Tubes isn’t like that. It’s always changing. Because of that, it’s smart to constantly switch things up. Remember that you’re doing experiments, which should be temporary unless they work like gangbusters.
Example: I tried a thing that sent a DM to to thank everybody who followed me on Twitter, and that was a big, giant NOOOOO. People hate DM’s with the passion of a billion burning suns. Experiment over.
Photos turned out to be a great experiment gone right. Now, every post I do has a feature photo, and I’m sticking more and more photos and video into everything I do. There’s research on this. They put Pulitzer-prize winning text on a page with no photos or graphics, then complete drivel on a page with a nice layout and a photo. What did people like better? The drivel with a photo. We are visual creatures, people. Visual visual visual.
Bottom line: You learn more by trying all kinds of things than by doing the same old thing. It’s more fun and more effective.
Lesson 3: Don’t get distracted–remember your core priority
I truly doubt that more than 1 percent of you make a living doing social media.
Remember that messing around with your blog, or posting to Twitter, can easily suck up all your free time.
If you’re a writer, it’s wise to do your writing first. Only play around with Twitter and such after you’ve gotten that daily word count nailed.
And try to think back to the real point of it all. It takes a crazy amount of traffic (and usually staff) to make a living off web traffic by getting millions of hits a month. First, you won’t ever get that. Second, you’re shouldn’t try, because that’s not the point. Most of us are doing social media to be SOCIAL–to write about what we love and meet people around the world who are into the same exact things, whether it’s Underwood typwriters from 1934 or knit hats for cats.
P.S. I did recently go from Premium WordPress to Business, to try some things out. Will report back on those experiments, including instant translations of the blog to many languages, which is why I’m suddenly getting traffic from Bulgaria and such, along with other craziness. Good times.
Listen, I made a joke on the Twitter about TV weather reporters.
GOV’T: Everybody evacuate before this hurricane kills you. No joke.
376 TV WEATHER REPORTERS: Yo, we got these sweet windbreakers, so we’re hitting the beach for 72 straight hours of live shots. pic.twitter.com/UHfF8kTXLa
Except there’s more to it than a joke. These folks really are brave, and no, those windbreakers do not make them invincible.
As a former journalist, I get what they’re doing. We used to have the police scanner on all day and night in the newsroom, and if you heard about a flood, fire, car crash, murder or other bit of mayhem, it was a race to see who could grab their camera and notebook to get out the door first.
When everybody else heads away from danger, reporters walk right up and say hi.
Weather reporters don’t get much respect. It’s seen as an entry-level job, with veterans and hotshots doing “real news.”
So noobs at a TV station are usually the ones who have to get up at oh-dark-thirty to drive into the mountains and do a live shot at 6 a.m. that yes, it’s snowing, as you can see. Then another live shot at 6:30, 7:30, noon, and so forth. The same shot. The same news.
TV weather reporters wade into the floodwaters and storm surges.
And yes, they hit the beaches and try to remain upright when hurricanes roll in with 100+ mph winds.
It’s a tough job.
We should appreciate them more. These folks literally risk their lives trying to educate us and hopefully save some lives. Because if they’re showing up with a brave camera crew, it’s a clear sign that we really should get out of town.
If you went to university, like me, and studied the philosophers and the political science and such, you learned that people far, far smarter than us violently disagree on (a) how the world works, (b) how the world SHOULD work and (c) who should run the world.
However: I can boil down just about all the major approaches to these worldly questions by using TWO COWS.
Here we go.
ANARCHY: You have two cows. Either you sell the milk at a fair price — or your neighbors steal your cows and kill you.
FEUDALISM: You have two cows. Your lord takes some of the milk.
PURE DEMOCRACY: You have two cows. Your neighbors decide who gets the milk.
NIHILISM: You have no cows. Who really cares, anyway? They’re just gonna die some day, and so are you. And nobody’s going to remember you. And even if they did, you’d still be dead. It’s all so pointless. You might as well be dead now.
COWS WITH GUNS: You are a cow, and humans want to turn you into hamburger. The only solution? A revolution.
DARWINISM: You have two cows. They develop opposable thumbs and milk you.
NORTH KOREAN COMMUNISM: We do not need cows. Those are the tools of the ruthless capitalist exploiters and rapists of the proletariat in the oppressed, feudal South. We will, in keeping with the principles of Juche, eat our own grass. Please do not pay attention to the mooing coming from the two large crates addressed to the Dear Leader, Kim Jong Il.
DICTATORSHIP: You have two cows. The government takes both and drafts you into the army.
Spoiler: the first movie is perfect, while the two sequels put the S in Suck. Image via Wikipedia
REPRESENTATIVE DEMOCRACY: You have two cows. Your neighbors pick someone to tell you who gets the milk.
ROMANTICISM: You have two beautiful, majestic, elegant, bovine companions. You think about them daily.
PURE SOCIALISM: You have two cows. The government takes them and puts them in a barn with everyone else’s cows. You have to take care of all of the cows. The government gives you as much milk as you need.
BRITISH DEMOCRACY: You have two cows. One of your cows has a small foot infection. The government orders you to burn both cows. All the cows in the surrounding area are also burned, roads and footpaths are closed and the media throws the country into a panic. You decide to protest about not being allowed to hunt foxes on public roadways.
PURE COMMUNISM: You have two cows. Your neighbors help you take care of them, and you all share the milk.
BERKELIAN ANALYSIS: You have two cows. You put your cows in a drawer and close it. Your two cows cease to exist.
RUSSIAN COMMUNISM: You have two cows. You have to take care of them, but the government takes all the milk.
VEGANISM: You have two cows, and choose not to exploit them. Everyone is happy, especially the cows.
CANADIAN CAPITALISM: You have 2 cows. The government takes the milk and puts it in a bag. You get free health care.
YODAISM: Two cows you have, hmmm?
INDUSTRIALISM: You have two cows. You dissect them both and figure out how to build a milk-factory instead.
CONSERVATIVE CAPITALISM: The poor should give their cows to the rich so that the milk will trickle back down to the poor.
BIG BROTHERISM: You have two cows. Black is white. Eurasia is ungood. Eastasia is ungood. Oceania is plusgood. BB is doubleplus good. You have one cow.
SWISS CAPITALISM: You have 5000 cows, none of which belongs to you. You charge for storing them for others. If they give milk, you tell no one.
FREUDIAN ANALYSIS: You have two cows. You dream that they come to your bedroom at night, dressed in your mother’s clothes. On waking, you initially deny that this could mean anything. On further consideration, you move through phases of intellectualisation, displacement and projection, and finally determine that the cows represent a psychic compensation for the passive/aggressive treatment you received from your father during your adolescence. Also, you have a thing for mom.
RUSSIAN CAPITALISM: You have two cows. You drink some vodka and count them again — whoah, you have FIVE cows. The Russian Mafia shows up and takes however many cows you may or may not have.
GOVERNMENT COW-ER-UP: Cows never crash-landed in the New Mexico desert. In fact, cows never even existed. You never saw anything.
UTOPIAN LIBERTARIANISM: You have two cows. You sell one, buy a bull and grow a prosperous herd of cows.
HONG KONG CAPITALISM: You have two cows. You sell three of them to your publicly listed company, using letters of credit opened by your brother-in-law at the bank, then execute a debt / equity swap with associated general offer so that you get all four cows back, with a tax deduction for keeping five cows. The milk rights of six cows are transferred via a Panamanian intermediary to a Cayman Islands company secretly owned by the majority shareholder, who sells the rights to all seven cows’ milk back to the listed company.
DARTH VADER: The two cows would be powerful allies. They will join us or die.
IDIOCRACY: You have two cows. One cow is stupid and breeds with other stupid cows, while the smart cow doesn’t try to mate. Eventually, you have lots of stupid cows.
NIGERIAN CAPITALISM: DEAR FRIEND, I AM SON OF FORMER NIGERIAN PRESIDENT SANI ABACHA. YOU WERE RECOMMENDED TO ME BY A COLLEAGUE. I HAVE A BUSINESS PROPOSITION FOR YOU. I HAVE TWO COWS…
PACIFISM: You have two cows. They stampede you.
CYNICAL LIBERTARIANISM: You have two cows. You sell one and buy a bull and grow a prosperous herd of cows that your neighbor steals. He may or may not shoot you first. But we don’t need a government or police — your survivors can always sue the evil neighbor for damages.
PROTECTIONISM: You have two cows. You can’t buy a bull from another country.
FRISBEETARIANISM: You have two cows. One of them flies up on the roof and gets stuck. You hope the government provides cow ladders.
SURREALISM: You have two giraffes. The government requires you to take harmonica lessons.
Let it be known: Romance authors have a good point when they say, “Romance is not a type of story.”
There are all sorts of different romance stories.
Which brings me to a deep, dark truth that needs to be said: They’ve done us wrong.
All of them.
Teachers and professors, authors and instructors and writing gurus of all stripes.
You’ve been done wrong, bamboozled, hornswoggled
My secret lair includes a turret that is a library, full of Every Book on Writing, Rhetoric and Journalism Known to Man, and those books are 99 percent useless claptrap about either (a) the correct placement of semi-colons, which I believe should simply be shot, or (b) finding your happy place while you write at the same time every day. These books are only good for kindling during the zombie apocalypse.
Your corduroy-clad creative writing teacher was wrong to say there are only three kinds of stories: man vs. self, man vs. man and man vs. society. Those are three types of conflict. Not stories. Also, there are far too many reference to “man” in there.
Aristotle was full of falafel when he told his eager fanboys there are only two stories: tragedies and comedies.
George Polti made things far too complicated when he gave us 36 Dramatic Situations, when what he really did was list 36 complications and conflicts, and if you want to drive down that twisty path, hell, I can write you a list of 532 Dramatic Situations before noon. If you gave me a pot of coffee, by 5 p.m. we’d get to 3,982 Dramatic Situations. (Yes, Mr. Internet Smarty Pants, you a genius for using the google to find a Wikepedia thing explaining that Polti was merely following in the footsteps of that literary giant Carlo Guzzi, but hear me know and believe me later in the week: Carlo Guzzi was also an overcomplicated doofus.)
Also: just as there is no romance story type, there is no such thing as a Western, though if you watch THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE UGLY, you are required by law to take a swig of decent tequila whenever Clint shoots a man and down two shots if he actually speaks a line of dialogue.
For you D & D and World of Warcraft and Lord of the Rings dorks–I say that lovingly, though I want you to put down the Cheetos and the Playstation controller to go out in the world to kiss a girl, though please make sure she wants to be kissed first, and does not Mace you–there is also no such thing as a sci-fi or fantasy story.
You can set a novel or movie a dusty Arizona mining town in 1875, or put the guts of that same story into a space station orbiting the second moon of Zenon or whatever. Either way, it’s the same story.
You can add dragons, trolls or elves with lightsabers and it’s still the same story in a different setting and context.
Because in the end, story is about structure–how you put the pieces together. Is the ending up, down or mixed? What are the setups and payoffs, reversals and revelations?
They don’t really teach us structure or storytelling
Blake Snyder cut through all this tradition and nonsense with his SAVE THE CAT books.
Blake points out that it’s patently stupid to call FATAL ATTRACTION a domestic drama and ALIEN a sci-fi movie and JAWS a horror flick, because they all three classic movies are the same basic, primal story: there’s a monster in the house. Either you kill it or it kills you.
Period. End of story.
I will not summarize Blake’s book here by giving away all his other evil secrets. He’s boiled things down to ten primal stories, and yes, you can insert as many Dramatic Situations as you want into those ten stories.
Blake has done all writers a great service with his two books, which have silly titles and a cover with a cat. As the writer of a silly blog, I give him slack for that. He’s not pompous, arrogant or overly complicated. Blake was simply a freaking genius when it comes to storytelling, and the world is a poorer place now that he died young.
If you write, and care about your craft, go buy his book. DO IT NOW. Then come back here to talk smack about structure, the real secret to writing of all sorts.
And that’s slow. I type about 80 or 90. Faster, if I have coffee. Even quicker with headphones blasting, or on deadline.
Coffee plus headphones plus a deadline? Fuggetaboutit. That keyboard is gonna sing.
The thing is, all the speed in the world doesn’t really matter.
Here comes the math
Let’s say you write full-time, all day, every day. No day job to worry about, no cramming in writing at 4 in the morning when the kids are asleep or scribbling forty minutes a day on a yellow legal pad (are there other colors? why yes, there are, including PURPLE) as you ride the train from New Jersey to the NYC.
Say you’re not that fast. Fifty words a minute.
Fifty words per minute =
3,000 words per hour
24,000 words per eight-hour day
120,000 words per week
That’s a ton of words. An incredible amount.
Let’s do a little more math to see how much we should be cranking out, if we’re not surfing the net, Twittering our lives away and checking out Facebook photos all day.
Here come the word counts:
200 words = letter to the editor
500 words = five-minute speech
600 words = news story
800 words = oped
1,000 words = 10-minute speech
Up to 3,000 words = profile or magazine piece
Up to 8,000 words = short story
3,000 words = 30-minute keynote speech
15,000 words = screenplay
20,000 to 60,000 words = novella
60,000 to 120,000+ words = novel
Of course, people don’t type every second of the workday.
Let’s say half your day is eaten by meetings, research and other things, and you only write four hours a day, or 20 hours a week. Even then, we’re talking about 60,000 words.
That’s most of a novel, four screenplays, 20 keynote speeches or 100 opeds.
In a single week.
Nobody writes that much. NOBODY.
Not even Stephen King, back when he was fueled by industrial amounts of caffeine, nicotine and other substances.
In fact, writers of all sorts are happy to produce between 500 and 2,000 good, usable words a day.
I know novelists who are happy to produce one good novel per year. If you divide 100,000 words by 52 weeks, you get a smidge less than 2,000 words per week and, I kid you not, less than 300 words per day.
I know reporters who crank out two stories a day, five days a week and columnists who do one or two opeds a week.
There are pro speechwriters, brilliant people I’ve known for years, who take two solid weeks to nail down a 30-minute keynote speech (3,000 words).
Before the invention of word processors, writing gods like Hemingway would pound on their Underwoods and count every word, quitting for the day when they hit 1,000–or even 500–that day.
But let’s be generous and say 2,000 words a day is a good day.
Where are the missing words? Why are all sorts of pro writers–reporters, novelists, poets, speechwriters–producing about 20 percent of what the math says?
Suspect No. 1: It’s not really eight hours or even four hours
This looks like the obvious culprit, because it’s the only person sneaking away from the crime scene with a guilty look and blood on the bottom of their shoes.
Reporters have to cover stories, get quotes from sources and meet with editors.
Novelists need to do research, talk to their agent, go on book tours and so forth.
Every writer, reporter and novelist has to do research, travel and attend meetings. Nobody is chained to the desk the entire workday, pounding on the keyboard like a typist. They need to eat of the food sometimes, and drink of the wine, and have a life.
HOWEVER: A lack of hours isn’t what’s wrong here.
Let’s say even more of the day is toast. Research. Phone calls. E-mail. Lunch with some big important person. Twittering to your buddies.
Fine, let’s go all the way down and say six of your eight hours are toast, and there are only TWO HOURS of actual banging on the keyboard.
3,000 words per hour X 2 hours = 6,000 words a day.
And yet the most writers typically can hit, day after day, is 2,000 words.
Where are the missing words?
Also, I know writers who spend six hours a day in meetings, doing research, returning e-mail and all that — and they still bang on the keyboard at least four to eight hours a day because they’re working crazy hours. A lot of writers work weekends, too. Writing is often a daily habit.
Yet 2,000 words per day seems like a kind of universal wall for writers of all stripes. Why?
Suspect No. 2: We type slower than narcoleptic turtles
This suspect doesn’t even get handcuffed and taken down to the station for a chat.
I used 50 words a minute because it’s the average typing speed of the general population.
Serious and professional writers are typically a lot faster, unless they’re hunting and pecking on an Underwood because that’s what they’ve always done since they first got published in 1926. There aren’t that many authors in that category.
If you dictate your stuff with Naturally Speaking or whatever, it’s more like 100 words a minute.
But let’s be generous again and pretend we all type really, really slow.
25 words a minute = 1,500 words an hour.
Even if we say Suspect No. 1 (Miss Most Hours of the Day Get Wasted) and Suspect No. 2 (Mr. Types Slowly) shacked up in a cheap motel and conspired to murder the creativity of all writers, it doesn’t get us down to 2,000 words a day.
Four hours at the keyboard at 30 words per minute is still 6,000 words a day. Two hours is 3,000 words, which is closer, but not plausible. Professional writers aren’t much slower than average typists–they’re a lot faster.
We need a better theory of the crime.
Suspect No. 3: Writing requires deep, deep thinking
Ah, this one is good. It’s lurking in the shadows.
It’s evil. Hard to refute.
How can you say that writing is shallow and easy?
How can you deny the art required, the creativity?
This isn’t an assembly line. It’s not a factory where we churn out widgets. Writers create something original, whether it’s a 500-word story for the newspaper or a 100,000-word novel.
Except I know better. Because I’ve been watching.
Going off my own experience wouldn’t be proof of squat. Maybe I’m an anomaly. Maybe I type 80+ words per minute (true) and separate writing from editing (also true).
But I know writers of all sorts. Reporters, speechwriters, novelists, you name it, and just about everybody who writes for money bangs on the keyboard at least four hours a day, and they’re all faster than 50 words a minute. That’s 3,000 words per hour.
Even going with four hours a day of actual writing, we should be at 12,000 words a day. Except we’re not.
Suspect No. 4: We’re creating while destroying
This is our killer. I’ve seen him at work.
I’ve helped other writers catch the evil scumbag, convict him and send him upstate so he can’t do any more damage.
We are typing away on the keyboard, and we’re not doing it at 10 words per minute. We are writing fast. It’s just that we destroy those words just as fast.
Why do we writers destroy more than we create?
Not because the words aren’t pretty. Sentence by sentence, they’re fine.
It’s because the structure is wrong.
I’ve looked at bad drafts that hit the roundfile. The sentences were pretty. It was the structure that failed.
We spend so much time trying to fix these things because we nobody teaches us structure.
Oh, they taught me the inverted pyramid in journalism school, which is the best possible blueprint for a story if you want to give away the ending right away and put people in a coma the longer they read.
Creative writing professors teach us characterization and the three types of conflict in creative writing.
Rhetoric professors give us logical fallacies and different types of arguments in speech and debate.
Journalism profs teach us hard and soft headlines and the different types of ledes.
Yet that’s not really structure. It’s tiny bits and pieces.
Building a house one room at a time, without blueprints
They way most of us write is like trying to build a house one room at a time. Winging it, without any blueprints.
Pour the foundation for the front door and foyer.
Frame it. Wire it for electricity. Drywall it. Paint it.
Now dig the foundation for the kitchen and build that.
Where should the living room go? OK, we did that, but forgot to put in stairs to the second floor, so we’ve got to tear it all down and start over.
That’s how I used to write. It’s how most writers I know do it.
You start at the beginning and work your way through it, trying to fix any problems with structure along the way.
My old friend and mentor, Robin, was guilty of this. He’d spend a week on an oped, which is only 800 words. He was a brilliant man, one of the smartest I’ve ever known, and a good example of why mixing research, writing and editing into a single process slowed everything down to a snail’s pace. He’d create and destroy thousands and thousands of words before he had 800 on a final draft.
Doing research, writing and editing all at once is no way to run a railroad. It’s building a house without blueprints, blindly hoping the beginning will magically connect with the middle and an end you haven’t figure out yet.
I’ve had houses designed and built. If a contractor tried to build a house the way we writers work, it wouldn’t take six months to finish it. It’d take six years, or forever.
So this is our killer, our time-suck, our nemesis.
Question is, how do you DO structure — and how do we, as writers, learn to draw good blueprints, so we stop spending 80 percent of our time at the keyboard destroying what we created?
A classic post from my old blog, updated a bit. For new folks, enjoy.
Let it be known: we men must rethink our natural manly instinct that romance novelists are something to avoid, like SEX AND THE CITY 2, which is indeed worthy of scorn, and woe unto any man whose girlfriend or wife coerced them into wasting two hours of their life to see that stupid thing. No bribe is sufficient.
Published romance novelists are not only talented and funny, but many can write circles around the 6.57 gazillion reporters, writers and novelists I know.
These women are more talented than most folks writing about elves and spaceships, or elves riding spaceships, because there is so much freaking competition with romance novels.
Are there bad romance novels out there? Sure, just like any genre. But with so many books and writers, it’s like throwing 10,000 authors into the Thunderdome, tossing in a single chainsaw and refusing to unlock the door until there’s only one woman left. That woman is going to kick tail. She will be a writing goddess.
And the message is good. Romance novels don’t want men to be to be office drones, worried about TPS reports, or moody, over-educated basket cases you read about in literary novels.
Romance novels want men of action and charm, packing swords if not guns, and sometimes guns and swords. Any man can learn this from googling “romance novel covers.” IT IS AN EDUCATION.
Fabio and a sword is all you need. Shirts are optional.I hadn’t read romance novels, or even checked covers until now. Yet now that my eyes are open, we men should band together to pool our resources to give romance novels serious tax subsidies, because romance authors and readers are a secret army doing a $16.5 billion public relations campaign for men everywhere.
And, yes, the genre is bigger than that. It’s a big push for love of all stripes, which is a good thing. Life isn’t about having the biggest pile of dead presidents. It’s about family and who you love. As a husband and father, I get that.
So, romance novelists and readers, I am holding a mug of Belgium beer which I raise your direction.
The Red Pen of Doom 