Conventional wisdom about writing is conventionally wrong.
Not just any old scientists playing with beakers in the lab or whatever. No.
Brilliant boffins who work at the world’s greatest superconducting super-collider made this zombie movie, using the creepy tunnel parts of their fancy machine as movie sets.
I would actually watch this thing.
Not too shabby, scientist peoples of CERN — keep on making these things.
Related: tying a bow tie is a pain. No wonder Daniel the Craig runs around with the stupid bow tie undone.
The shocking video of a giant flipping golden eagle, soaring in like some kind of pterodactyl, which I can’t even spell, to snatch a toddler — well, that thing may or may not be a total fake.
Watch it and decide.
Not fake is this long nature video of a golden eagle killing and eating MOUNTAIN GOATS.
I am not making that up. Why bother hunting rats, rabbits, purse dogs belonging to Paris Hilton, wolves, tiny humans and anything else under 33 pounds — why even mess with such trifling things when you can take out giant goats, and do so using jedi bird mastery of gravity?
We should remember three things: (1) birds are feathered dinosaurs, (2) golden eagles are like mini velicoraptors WHO CAN FLY and (3) if you have one as a pet, I am not cleaning the bird cage.
Bonus video: a rundown, with all kinds of scientific numbers and such about the golden eagle, truly the honey badger of birds. (Though in a fight, I’m putting a purple euro on the honey badger.)
This is shockingly fun to watch and interesting.
Without trying to tell a story, this man tells a story.
I tip my hat to you, Mr. One Second Every Day — well done, sir. Well done.
The great thing: anybody with a smart phone can do this, and do it well.
It is official: social media now dominates the Series of Tubes.
Every year, these smart people produce a slick video about the interwebs, and this year’s video is especially good and interesting.
Now, having filled your brain with facts and numbers and industrial euro-pop dance music, WHAT DO WE DO?
Simple. We change the world.
Change # 1: One Contact Thing to rule them all
So you’ve got contacts in your gmail at home and Outlook at work, Twitter lists of followers and all kinds of Facebook friends, Tumblr buddies and Pinterest pals and a dozen other things.
It is an unholy mess.
Blessed be the app that gives us One Contact Thing, a single shebang with the magical powers to organize all your contacts, from all those stupid platforms, in one tidy place. The power will be unthinkable.
This means ending the nonsense about Instagram not talking to Twitter because she saw him flirting with Google or whatever. And yes, we need it to be easy and quick and on our phones. Because I’m not firing up the PC every time I need to look up a phone number or Twitter handle.
Whoever does this first — Apple, Google, Microsoft, some dude in his basement coding the app in his pajamas — will rule the interwebs forever and ever.
Change # 2: Obliterate voice mail and switch to texting
Am I saying we should take voice mail behind the barn and shoot it? No. I’m saying take it behind the barn, hang it, set it on fire, THEN shoot it.
Nobody likes voice mail. Nobody.
Don’t call my cell phone and make me dial up voice mail, punch in a password I keep forgetting, then listen for two minutes. Especially when 99.99 percent of all voice mail messages are things you can sum up in a short text like, “Phone tag, you’re it” or “Pick up some milk, yo” or “I’m a reclusive billionaire with $400 million sitting around, and instead of handing it to Karl Rove, who I wouldn’t trust at this point to run a successful race for student body president at Willapa Valley Junior High, I’d like some return on my investment.”
Send a text, people. College kids these days don’t even use email anymore. They think email is so 1994.
If it’s too complicated for a text, send an email.
If you really hate me, send a voice mail. Make it long. Don’t leave your number or email — assume that I’ve memorized it. And then when I call back, make sure you don’t answer your phone so I can start the whole thing rolling with a voice mail of my own.
Therefore, we will nuke voice mail from orbit, and the world will rejoice.
Change # 3: Real photos, good bios and no anonymous trolls
Twitter, Facebook and every other social media shebang is full of photos and bios of people that may be human, and might be young or old, male or female, con artist or genius.
You can’t tell, though, because (a) their profile photo is a shot of a cat, Yoda holding a lightsaber or a pile of leaves, (b) their Twittter handle is @jkringer392 and (c) their bio is a train wreck of obscure references to Star Trek fan fiction and such. I have seen all of these things and more. Who will pay for my therapy?
Related post: 30 achy breaky Twitter mistakeys
There are plenty of places for anonymous folks to say whatever they like. Sites like reddit will always be around. Have at it.
HOWEVER: papers of news, TV stations and serious blogs need to stop feeding the trolls by letting TrailerParkNinja and TexasMustSecede2016! dominate the comment sections with anonymous spam and hateful, nonsense. So let’s cut back on that by requiring commenters to use real photos and bios. Want to spew? Go spew in Anonymous Land.
If you’re going to be on the Series of Tubes, and want to be taken Seriously, you need a Serious photo — of you, not your cat — and a real bio. Period.
Long ago, only famous people needed public relations folks, who made sure actors, authors and other celebrities had good mug shots and nice bios. Today, everybody is online. Your photo, bio and name are what people see first. But average people don’t have a publicist. They’re flying in the dark with a blindfold, and yeah, it shows.
Wonder why you aren’t getting many followers on Twitter or hits to your blog? Take a look at your photo and bio.
Trying to get a job / book deal / punk rock music contract? Take a hard look at what people see, in the first five seconds, when they check you out on Twitter and the Book of Face and such.
People don’t make a decision about you after reading your short stories or listening to three mp3s of sample songs on your blog. They glance at your photo and decide, in half a second, whether to interact with you or never give you a second thought. They do this all the time, in a hurry. Ten people just followed you on Twitter, and you follow back or not, clicking away with your mousity mouse, no-no-yes-no-yes-yes-no. You don’t ponder these decisions, right? Bam. So make it easy on people by taking it seriously. I’m talking to you, Miss Duckface, who shot your profile photo in the bathroom mirror using an iPhone.
People need a place –a Profile Doctor–to get easy and quick help with this sort of thing, without putting a public relations firm on retainer.
I remember seeing this clip, way back: Australian hurdler Michelle Jenneke, not nervous and freaking out before her big race — just happy to be there and filled with infectious joy.
And now she’s good-humored enough to do this video.
Happy Goddess of Australian Hurdlers, I salute you.
If anybody ever deserved to have their own reality show — a show people would actually watch to see somebody fun, instead of human train wrecks like Snooki and the cast of Jersey Shore — then it should be you, Michelle the Jenneke.
That’s the acid test for every writer: four words.
If somebody in line with you for the Largest Latte Known to Man asks what you’re working on, can you explain it in four words?
How about eight words?
Because if you can’t, you’re not really done.
And I don’t care that you’ve spent the last seven years locked away in a French monastery, slaving away 25 hours a day, eight days a week to perfect (a) The Great American Novel, Even Though It Was Written in France, (b) the movie script that will turn Hollywood on its ear and stop it from spending $250 million apiece on Michael Bay explosion-fests involving robots that transform into cars or whatever or (c) a punk-rock masterpiece with song after song with lyrics so beautiful, and rebelliously ugly, that anyone who listens to it quits working for The Man and buys an electric Fender so they can learn the only three chords you need to know to become AN INSANE ROCK GOD.
So let’s get down to it. If you haven’t already, read these posts to get all educated and such, even though it is technically cheating — because today, there is a quiz.
Writing secret: Light as air, strong as whiskey, cheap as dirt
Writers, we are doing it BACKWARDS
Writing secret: all you need is CURIOSITY and SURPRISE
THE MOTHER OF ALL LOGLINE QUIZZES
Loglines, which, if you weren’t paying attention, are short little summaries of movies and books and such.
There are two ways to score this quiz, the first involving length and the second quality.
Four words or less gets you an A, five words is a B and so forth.
Quality is subject, but even if your logline is insanely brilliant, anything over eight words gets a big fat F, and F that glows in the dark and follows you around for a week like a bad cold or a moldy metaphor, which is like a simile, but different.
Sidenote: If you are a Literary Muffin of Stud, go ahead and share your brilliant answers in the comments. Then we’ll talk smack.
Sidenote on the side of that sidenote: If you are a shy lurker, as 99.9 percent of writers are, print this and scribble your answers, then share your brilliant answers somewhere, with somebody. Because it’s time you stopped being a shy lurker writer type. YOUR HEAD WILL NOT EXPLODE. Maybe you’ll even make a friend over the Series of Tubes and such, fall in love, get married and move to a former dairy farm in Vermont or whatever. These things have happened.
Quiz Part 1) Write a logline for your favorite movie, but turn the villain into the hero without changing the story.
Example
STAR WARS: Wise ruler fights to stop murderous rebels, who keep blowing up invaluable public property.
Shot the length rule to bits there. Let’s shorten it to five words.
STAR WARS: Wrinkled leader battles murderous rebels.
There we go. I like it. Could have nailed four words if we smited “wrinkled,” but I don’t care.
Bonus, because we hit five words and give ourselves an A++ and such: Palpatine’s Greatest Hits, Vol. 1.
Quiz Part 2) Take your current project — movie, novel, performance art piece involving a dance number that expresses your feelings about unemployment — and write a logline making fun of it.
Go ahead. Have at it.
It’s more fun than you’d expect.
Quiz Part 3) Write five fresh loglines by twisting or rewriting stupid books and movies that had promise, then took all that promise and blew it to pieces with The 12-gauge of Utter Stupidity.
Examples
MATRIX REVOLUTIONS: Man wins war against robot enslavers.
Six words. It’s a better plot, because not Keanu “Whoah” Reeves doesn’t sacrifice his life to play virus cleaner for the robots, therefore protecting the status quo and ensuring a cycle of endless war and nuttiness. His death actually changes things with this logline. But six words is still too long.
MATRIX REVOLUTIONS: Man frees mankind from robots.
Five words. Too many “mans” in there. Where’s Trinity and such? But it’s better.
ONE SHOT: Tom Cruise is a foot too short to play Reacher.
Yes, I am a bad man. The trailer still looks awful. Couldn’t they find some short actors to play the thugs who Tom Cruise beats up? It looks like junior high bullies hassling a second-grader for his lunch money.
ONE DAY: Man meets girl, loses girl, gets girl back.
That’s the standard plot for every romantic comedy ever, but it’s also 1,398 times better than the actual plot of ONE DAY where man meets girl, man loses girl, man loses girl again, man finally marries girl, girl gets RANDOMLY PANCAKED BY A TRUCK, man is sad, roll credits.
TRANSFORMERS 3: DARK SIDE OF THE MOON OR WHATEVER: Magic robots leave Earth, because why would magic robots need our lame technology and such anyway? Also, Megan Fox buys a pair of pants.
I’m cheating again, though it is fun. Alright, TRANSFORMERS 3: Robot war obliterates Earth.
Much better. Also, it’s right up the alley of Michael Bay, who loves nothing more than blowing up stuff anyway.
My friend Max (short for Maxima, though if it were short for Maximus that would also be cool in a GLADIATOR way) has introduced me to Macklemore.
He’s a Seattle rapper famous for the THRIFT STORE song and video, which is worth an entirely post by itself.
I’d heard Macklemore’s songs on the radio and such, but not the music videos, seeing how MTV doesn’t play vids anymore because, you know, wall-to-wall Jersey Shore nonsense and such. Snooki needs her screen time.
This video is long and courageous and well done.
I salute you, Macklemore, for having the range to do a hilarious romp like THRIFT STORE and the guts to do this quiet little beauty.
Yes, the cinematography was beautiful. Just watch the trailer, which is packed with great shot after great shot.
But that’s not why.
Also: cinematography is just a fancy word for “hiring the right dude to actually work the camera and stage amazing shots, because the director is really the Big Boss of the film and not the guy behind the camera, though papers of news will confuse you about this by talking about the man behind the camera when they talk about directors.”
Also-also: the dialogue and writing was much, much better than your typical Bond film. But that’s not what made SKYFALL so excellent that it may be the first Bond film in the history of modern civilization to get nominated for Oscars.
So what truly made SKYFALL so good?
Story.
Story is the reason that Michael Bay can waste $250 million apiece on movie after movie about robots that change into cars or whatever, movies that only 12-year-old boys really enjoy watching.
Story is the reason THE KING’S SPEECH — made for about $20 million — crushes any Michael Bay explosion-fest known to man.
As a big fan of cheesy action movies, I appreciate ones that embrace their cheesiness. They make it more fun. When you start taking a movie about robots from outer space too seriously, it shows on the screen and stops being fun.
SKYFALL rocks so hard because it takes something else seriously: story.
Just for comparison, I watched a typical 007 movie from the Roger Moore era: THE SPY WHO LOVED ME.
Here’s the trailer for that piece of cinematic trash:
SKYFALL and this Roger Moore thing have the same ingredients: (a) suave spy for the British Secret Service who (b) can’t walk down the street without tripping over 27 beautiful women, half of whom are (c) trying to kill him because they work for (e) some insane villain with pet sharks and a secret lair inside a volcano. There will be (f) glorious gadgets and (g) amazing chase scenes and (h) witty one-liners.
That formula means nothing if you — the audience and the director and the actors — don’t care about the characters.
Bond has typically been made of cardboard. Oh, he’s got the tuxedo and the charm and the gadgets. He gets the girls. But what makes him tick? Does he ever suffer and sacrifice and change?
Roger Moore never really suffered or sacrificed or changed.
Daniel the Craig definitely suffered and sacrificed in CASINO ROYALE. And he bumped that way, way up in SKYFALL.
Sidenote: A big reason that A QUANTUM OF SOLACE stank up the joint was the Hollywood writer’s strike meant the writing and story was thrown together by the director and Craig, on set. Not a recipe for success.
The more brilliant move by Sam Mendes and his writers was to give serious character arcs not just to Bond, but to the traditional supporting cast at MI-6, the characters who are usually just pieces of scenery.
In the old Bond movies, M was just a boss behind the desk and Moneypenny was a pretty secretary that flirted with Bond as he hung up his coat and went in for his next assignment.
In SKYFALL, Moneypenny is an amazing driver who shoots somebody you don’t expect. She’s actually important to the plot.
Even a minor character played by Ralph Fiennes goes from bureaucrat and enemy to courageous ally. He gets a story arc.
And this time, M is absolutely crucial to the plot.
Crucial to Bond, who suffers quite a lot because of a decision she made: “Take the bloody shot.” Crucial to the villain, Silva, who suffered just as much, if not more, because of M.
Finally, M is crucial to the film’s story itself. You could argue that it’s her film.
Sam Mendes gives us a movie that’s not just chase scenes and gadgets and Bond girls — he makes us care about the characters. He takes us on a journey with them, with each of them forever changed.
And that’s the power of story.
The Red Pen of Doom 