About Good Crap
Post 347:
Putting out a good product requires a thousand choices, luck, and persistence. The same can be said about telling a good story—especially if it’s lengthy, like a movie script or novel.
Fortunately, help has arrived. This may be painfully obvious to the veterans and painfully dull for those that never want to be initiated. But I’ll do my thing and see what sticks.
Obviously, you need some characters. Or one. Or a thousand. It doesn’t matter. Whatever you’re feeling, go with it. There are one-man plays that are freaking awesome, and then there’s Ben-Hur (the original) with casts of untold souls. They can both work, as long as you… have them go somewhere.
Yes. People ask me all the time how I write stories. The simple answer is, I have some folks in one place, then over the course of the story, they wind up somewhere else.
That’s it. That’s the whole thing. It’s easy to learn, but hard to remember, because while you’re on your own journey of writing, there’s grammar and settings and plot points and lots going on.
Just keep it there, like a sliver in your brain: they’ve got to go somewhere.
That means everyone in the story.
No. This does not mean physically making a journey. The whole thing can be done from sitting in a chair. Some change has to occur though. Emotional, spiritual, yada yada and all the rest. I think it’s probably good to do both; to make your characters travel physically and inwardly, but there no are hard and fast rules.
As far as the other rules, make them up. It’s astonishing, but writers have a hard time making up rules, literally in the act of making up a story.
Let it fly. But keep the essentials simple. Nobody wants to read or watch something where characters are unaffected and everything kinda stays the same. Useless.
Just a little reminder. To paraphrase Vonnegut, have a character, give them a problem, and make them deal with it. People love that crap.
He’s right. Make crap that people will love, I say. Cheers. See you after.
