Fiction Writing Demystified Page 9

  Such shows usually fail, and more often than not, the problem should have been obvious going in, at the concept stage, before the project ever received a “go.”

  Should have been. Except that every few years one or another network — and writers who ought to know better — try to bring off another dramatic series about — say — a newsperson who solves crimes, or otherwise becomes instrumental in the outcome of really serious problems.

  They never work.

  Why? Because we don’t believe them. Because even the least sophisticated audience-member understands on a gut-level that the reporter’s job is that of an observer — a passive role — rather than that of a participant.

  Can a short story, novel, or one-shot movie succeed with such a protagonist? Certainly. But usually only if he or she functions outside the real bounds of the profession — goes beyond passive observation by becoming a participant, perhaps as a pseudo-detective who affects the outcome of the story, as in the superb All the President’s Men (Scr. William Goldman, from the book by Carl Bernstein & Bob Woodward — Dir. Alan J. Pakula). The true account of two persistent investigative reporters, Woodward and Bernstein were instrumental in bringing about the downfall and resignation of President Richard Nixon. Once the pair realized what they were onto in their story about the Watergate break-in, they did push the envelope of their franchise. But for such characters to work in a series of novels or movies, or sustain a weekly TV series, requires a major suspension of disbelief. How often can your heroes come even close to toppling a president?

  In the early 1970’s, The China Syndrome (Scr. Mike Gray, T.S. Cook, James Bridges — Dir. James Bridges) was a successful, topical, very exciting movie about a glitch at a fictional nuclear power plant that threatened to result in a nuclear meltdown. When the power company officials stonewall a feisty TV newswoman (portrayed by Jane Fonda), she and her crew become suspicious. They start investigating and, amid increasing tension and danger, they expose the cover-up and narrowly prevent disaster. Audiences bought it because it was so believable that those particular characters would have behaved that way.

  But then, several years later, CBS broadcast a series about such a newswoman (nicely played by the edgy/attractive Helen Shaver) and her team. Jessica Novack (Cr. Jerry Ludwig) was yanked after 5 or 6 episodes. The problem: you can’t do a nuclear meltdown 22 times per season. And trying to sell them as participants — beyond the unusual circumstance in The China Syndrome — was fundamentally untrue to their profession, rendering them non-believable as journalists. They were supposed to be reporters, but they came off as busybodies. Several subsequent network series about the press have similarly failed.

  Moreover, in real-life, when investigative reporters uncover a crime, it then usually becomes a police matter, thus taking it out of the newspersons’ hands.

  Early in my career I served briefly as story editor on a different kind of non-franchise show. It was titled Gavilan (Cr. Nick Corea) an action-adventure series about a former CIA agent, played by Robert Urich, who had quit the spook business because he could no longer “distinguish the good guys from the bad guys.”

  Which, incidentally, and I’m not making this up, generated a certain amount of hate-mail from people accusing us of bad-mouthing the very organization that — in their minds, anyway — had saved our way of life from the godless commies. Go figure.

  So anyway, Gavilan was finally engaged in work he loved — marine biology.

  An okay premise, right?

  Wrong.

  Because every week, Gavilan would find himself dragged away from his favorite occupation so that he could rescue someone from terrible danger, vanquishing the bad guys in the bargain. And Bob, being the honest actor he was, played it straight — played the fellow who would really rather be in his laboratory than reluctantly beating up heavies, getting punched in the stomach and shot at. Oh, Gavilan got into it once he was into it, but — and here was the problem — a weekly television series? About a man who would rather be doing something other than what we’ve got him doing...? Uh-uh.

  Remember our audience — our viewer? The person who loathes his assembly-line job, or selling nails at the hardware store, or her dialing-for-dollars gig at the telemarketing firm. Does that individual really want to spend an hour a week with another bozo who hates what he’s doing, who would rather be somewhere else?

  I don’t think so.

  Yet for a single gig, in a play, novel or screenplay, such characters offer great potential for protagonists.

  Now, what we’re talking about here is your classic Reluctant Hero. We’ve all seen them in movies. A lot of movies. Alfred Hitchcock built almost his entire, very successful career making films about this guy. Actors from Robert Cummings to Cary Grant to Jimmy Stewart and others played the hell out of him — the ordinary bloke thrust into a desperate, life-threatening situation not-of-his-making.

  But — they were movies. One-shots. As are most novels with similar protagonists.

  The moral? If you’re trying to create a successful fictional series (novels, TV or films), you had damned well better design your protagonist(s) as people who are at least reasonably happy doing their jobs.

  A brief sidebar about the above-mentioned Gavilan show, and some peculiarities of series television in general: I had been hired in mid-season because the show was in trouble. As usually happens with such ill-conceived projects, the studio or network’s last-ditch salvage ploy is to throw fresh writers at them. Sometimes it works. In the case of Gavilan, however, I’d been there for about four weeks when the show’s fundamental problem(s) — and their solutions — hit me in one of those blinding, revelatory flashes. I phoned the Executive Producer, Leonard Goldberg, and told him we had to meet right away, that I’d nailed what was wrong with the show, and I knew how to fix it. Ten minutes later, at MGM’s Thalberg Building, in Goldberg’s suite (larger than my house, it had been Louis B. Mayer’s office during his reign as studio-head), I finished laying it out before Goldberg and an associate, both of whom were in excited agreement. All that was needed to ensure the show’s success was to revise the concept, give the hero an official franchise (as in making him a willing operative of some governmental agency, or even a freelance good-guy), and then write it so that saving people from the clutches of evildoers was his profession — his favorite thing to do in the whole world. That was the ticket to making the show last for years. As we were congratulating ourselves, Goldberg’s phone rang. It was NBC, canceling the show.

  Interestingly, and very usefully, there are a few classic franchises that offer unique, deliciously sneaky benefits for the writer. Particularly if they’re used as protagonists in, say, a series of novels or short stories. They are the private detective, the criminal defense lawyer and the bounty hunter. There may be others, but these are the most familiar. Why are these particular professions so valuable to writers of fiction? Because such characters, in the normal pursuit of their careers, can and do, and often must, lie and cheat. And sometimes bend or break laws. And still better, while they’re doing it, we are generally rooting for them.

  Theoretically at least, establishment-type series protagonists such as cops, judges and district attorneys can’t do that sort of thing. Doctors can’t. If they did, we’d cease being on their side. Oh, sure, there are the police detectives in procedurals such as the landmark NYPD Blue series (Cr. Steven Bochco and David Milch) or the detectives and prosecutors in Law & Order (Cr. Dick Wolf) who routinely bend the rules in order to close their cases.

  But — none of them offer the writer as many possibilities for creating fun characters — because none of them can routinely scam, break-and-enter, steal, or commit the sometimes more serious crimes and/or mischief that PI’s and bounty hunters get away with in order to bring down people who are usually worse than they are.

  Which tends to explain the enduring popularity of the roguish Private Eye Genre. Part of the appeal is that such characters readily lend themselves to portrayal as go
od/bad, not-entirely-black-andwhite, wily-yet-likable rascals. The con-artist who’s mostly on the side of the Angels.

  In crime fiction, of course, non-franchise protagonists are sometimes portrayed with great success. One of the more unconventional sub-categories of detective fiction has been exploited very effectively by, among others, master mystery writers Lawrence Block and Donald Westlake — the criminal-as-protagonist. Keller, the engaging subject of many of Block’s stories, is a professional hit-man. Westlake has written a lot of wildly funny novels about a not-toobright, only moderately successful thief, Dortmunder, and his even dimmer, bumbling cohorts. Further, writing under the pen-name Richard Stark, Westlake has produced a number of excellent novels told from the POV of a steely-nerved master thief, Parker.

  Among the more traditional non-franchise amateur detectives are Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple and Hammett’s The Thin Man. But unlike Gavilan, Marple and Nick & Nora Charles enjoyed solving crimes, and we, the audience, shared their pleasure.

  A notable example of a non-franchise TV series that thrived is Murder, She Wrote. While no small part of its success was the remarkable appeal of Angela Lansbury, the lead-character she so charmingly portrayed, Jessica Fletcher, was not a detective. She was a former schoolteacher who had become a best-selling mystery novelist. And in each show we wrote to that conceit, while trying to make it as easy as possible for the audience to accept that every week this lady would conveniently and coincidentally find herself in the vicinity of yet another homicide. Incidentally, the dynamic by which audiences accept such phenomena is known as willing suspension of disbelief. Writers use it to their advantage in all forms of fiction and media — but I don’t recommend pushing it in a TV series unless you’re lucky enough to have a star like Lansbury.

  And of course, Jessica Fletcher was a happy camper. She loved figuring out whodunnit. She found the challenge irresistible — she almost never debated whether to become involved. “Hiring” problems? We ignored them, rarely bothering to justify, or even question, Jessica’s participation. We did it 22 times a year for 12 years, and fortunately our viewers were willing to go along with the gag, though around the production offices and sound-stages Jessica was jokingly referred to as The Angel of Death. In fact, we used to fantasize about doing an episode in which her arrival in a small town would send the citizens running for their lives.

  Another thought we toyed with — and chuckled over — was that Jessica was really a serial killer, that she had done all of the murders — and managed to pin them on others.

  But, wait a minute — why didn’t the police in any of those 264 episodes ever think of that...?

  The Character Bio

  It is not necessary to know everything about each of your characters before you begin writing a long piece, such as a novel.

  In fact, it’s almost impossible. Part of the process is that the characters reveal facets of themselves to you during the course of writing their stories. That’s why you should continually expand your character biographies. Add those fresh insights as they occur to you — don’t count on remembering them the following day. Or — beyond the next four minutes. Same with new ideas for story points or twists. You know the kind. They sometimes strike at 3AM, or while you’re driving or flossing your teeth — at which time you had damned well better scribble them on a notepad, or tape-record them, because they have a tendency to vanish as abruptly as they appeared.

  A good habit I picked up TV, where I had a nearly one hour commute to and from the studio, was to have my audiocassette recorder on the car seat beside me. Many story notes, and whole pages of dialogue were written that way. I still pack my recorder in with my laptop, even if I’m only going away overnight.

  Most of us learn early on to begin developing our characters by writing brief bios, three, four lines, more as we learn more about them. But again, it isn’t enough to only write that they went to this school or grew up in that town, or that she’s the daughter of this other character or he’s the former husband of that woman. That’s information, and yes, you must know those things, along with those prosaic “Driver’s License” facts — age, height, weight and so on.

  But what’s really important to your story — and more importantly to you as the writer — the key questions you must ask yourself, and then answer before you start writing the actual text — and I am purposely being redundant here, as well as elsewhere — are: what are the lines of conflict between this character and other characters in the piece? Where’s the heat? Where are the problems? The pain? The one-sided or mutual abrasiveness? What does each want — and is having a hard time getting? How do their goals clash with the interests of the other players? Are two or more of them pursuing the same ends? Will the achievement of one character’s goal — the journey that gets him there — cost the well-being or the life of another character? Will it cost him his own soul? Will a character be required to make a moral decision, a choice between right and wrong? Or, preferably, one that isn’t so absolute, one with more shadings of ambiguity.

  These are the elements you should be looking for — and finding — as you develop your cast of characters. Is it really necessary to spell them out for yourself, to write it all down, or is it okay to simply keep them in mind? That’s the choice of the individual author. I’ve been writing for a long time, and I’m still a lot more comfortable being able to read it. Somehow, having all those details in a place where I can easily refer to them beats the hell out of dredging my memory — most of all when I’m involved in the high-wire act of maintaining my overview of an entire novel.

  The daughter — does she hate her mother or father? Does she have a difficult relationship with her brother or sister? Is she frustrated in love? Does she want to pursue a career that her parents find objectionable? Does she see herself as a victim? If she does, that’s a pretty good fit with alcoholism, substance-abuse or other self-destructive patterns. Behavior that is often — as in real-life — at cross-purposes, irrational, counter-productive, outright self-punishing. Actions that seem to make little sense — till we peel away the layers of self-deception.

  Is she the eldest? First children and only children tend to be achievers. And risk-takers. As do those whose siblings are much older. Almost all of the daring, highly motivated, high-achieving men who became the original astronauts in America’s JFK-inspired push to the moon back in the 1960’s were either only-children, or were far enough apart in age from their older and/or younger sibs to have felt like only-children.

  Is your protagonist the youngest? Your readers will find it believable if he or she remains childlike — the baby. Why? Because those traits, while hardly etched in stone, are common aspects of human behavior we’ve all seen or experienced. Facets with which we — your audience — can readily connect. That’s the stuff you must know about your characters, and then use, keeping it alive as you write. Material that will give you your characters’ reactions, give you your scenes. And your subtext within those scenes.

  Which is why, incidentally, it’s so difficult to write interesting scenes between two people who are in love. Basically, you’re dealing with characters who are on the same page. Simply put, people who agree with each other, who have no differences of opinion or attitude or intention, are not terribly entertaining. But — to see how that problem can be overcome — brilliantly, examine some of the great screwball-comedy movies of the 1930’s and 1940’s, films directed and/or written by Howard Hawks, Ernst Lubitsch or Preston Sturges. His Girl Friday (Scr. Charles Lederer, based on The Front Page, a hit play by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur — Dir. Howard Hawks), arguably one of the three or four funniest movies ever made, consists of edgy, high-energy, conflict-laden scenes from beginning to end. As do other masterpieces of film comedy such as The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek and Christmas in July, (both of them written and directed by Preston Sturges). In my classes and seminars I often use the opening scene from Christmas in July as a model. In it, the audience meets two people who are
obviously in love — and also in conflict. Sturges found the edge, and did it with such charm that we’re hooked. We want to know what will happen with this couple.

  From the start, as you are creating your characters, building their bios, you must find those edges.

  Edges come from your characters — how you have designed them — and how you juxtapose them — the situations in which you place them — situations that provide conflict.

  The sum and substance of all this, as stated earlier, is to train yourself to think conflict. During my television career, writers have pitched scenes to me by saying that two (or more) characters are “discussing” X or Y. My invariable reaction is to interrupt them and point out that discussions are what we see on PBS panel shows. We write arguments (more about that in the chapter on writing dialogue).

  It’s a way of thought. Again, a mindset. Take a closer look at the next successful TV sitcom or drama you view. In television, where the audience is far less captive than, say, in a theater, we cannot afford to do scenes without conflict (I don’t think novelists or makers of theatrical movies can afford it either, but they sometimes get away with it). Do such scenes sometimes make it to the final cut of a TV series episode? Sure. But they shouldn’t. And on my shows, they did not. The same pertains even if our audience consists of one — the reader of our novel or short story.