The Popcorn and the Pen

Wendall -- every other Thursday

Before I was a novelist, I was a screenwriter. I still teach screenwriting in the Graduate Film School at UCLA, so I still think about movies. A lot. Lately, I’ve been thinking about how all those hours watching every thing from The Wizard of Oz to The Verdict to Parasite have helped—and shaped—me as a mystery author. 

 

 

My Cyd Redondo series started out as a script—my homage to the film Romancing the Stone—and eventually turned into Lost Luggage. 

 

 

During my first draft, I stumbled onto Stephen King’s On Writing, which insisted authors “. . . must do two things above all other: read a lot and write a lot.” 

 

 

I loved that advice, because it rationalized the pleasure and purpose I felt adding to my TBR pile. I’m no Stephen King, and movies and books are very different animals, but here are three reasons you can rationalize heading back into a dark cinema or picking up your remote as part of your ongoing education as an author.

 

# 1 CHARACTER BEHAVIOR

 

Over fifty percent of genre and commercial novels are written in the first person. Even in second or third person, novelists are allowed, and even encouraged, to describe what their characters are thinking and feeling. Screenwriters are not. Barring a constant voice over, a script must externalize thoughts, feelings, and backstory into concrete moments you can see or hear onscreen. Doing this well can be the hardest thing about film writing.

 

 

Luckily for us, screenwriters have actors to manifest these gestures, behaviors, and dialogue, so we can learn from them. In films, we can watch unspoken moments of commitment (Sally Field raising her “Union” sign in Norma Rae or Ingrid Bergman palming her Nazi husband’s key in Notorious), unrequited love (John Cusack holding up his boom box in Say Anything), friendship and compassion (Mahershala Ali teaching “Little” to swim in Moonlight), or the nervousness of attraction (Paul Giamatti babbling about Pinot in Sideways). 

 

 

Breaking down what actors do in a scene—underneath and between the words—can inspire more use of action, variety, and subtext in our own fiction writing.

 

Sometimes we forget that always having access to a character’s inner thoughts can create stasis, particularly if the character is always telling the truth. A steady stream of truth might be a relief in real life, but in fiction, it can lack modulation and suspense. If you can let some of your characters’ internal thoughts hide in behavior and subtext, the truth—when it appears—can be twice as shocking, heart-wrenching, hilarious, or powerful.

 

# 2 THE VALUE OF SEQUENCES

 

Often what we remember about a film or show we love is actually a sequence—the bicycle chase in E.T., the christening/massacre in The Godfather, the wedding dress store/food poisoning sequence in Bridesmaids, or the opening Winnebago/underwear sequence in Breaking Bad.

 

 

Sequences—a series of scenes arranged around a central idea, location, or event—become “mini movies,” held together by repeated phrases, objects, characters, and backgrounds. They give us ups and downs, crises and resolutions, in the midst of the larger experience of the film. Most of us make a real effort to end a chapter on a cliffhanger or a great line. But how much do we really think about the interior construction of the chapter, all the reversals and connective tissue that come before that payoff? Sequences and chapters aren’t the same things, but the principals behind these “mini movies” can improve the pacing and the impact of your chapters as well as your overall book.

 

 

One of the most important elements of screenplay structure and of sequence writing is the Midpoint. In a script, the Midpoint destroys a character’s initial plan for dealing with their problem and necessitates a different approach or focus. Structurally, this energizes the story and re-engages the audience. Sequences work the same way.

 

There’s a famous one in Bringing Up Baby, which begins with Cary Grant’s entrance in a top hat and ends with his walking out attached to Katherine Hepburn. It’s a masterclass in sequence writing. The piece is held together by the recurring use of the top hat, olives, handbags, and pratfalls. But it’s most impressive for its Midpoint, in which a psychiatrist informs Hepburn that “the love impulse in man frequently reveals itself in terms of conflict,” turning her irritation with Grant into a romantic obsession. The power struggles between them from that point on escalate the comedy and lead to the climactic decision which ends the sequence.

 

 

To see whether you’re getting the most out of your chapter structure, you might pay attention to the sequences in Three Days of the Condor, The Shape of Water, Sicario, Four Weddings and a Funeral, Get Out, Parasite, or your favorite film, to see how great screenwriters use this principle to their advantage.

 

# 3 CLEAR, IMPACTFUL ENDINGS:

 

An executive at Disney maintains the last ten minutes of any film are the most important. No matter how good the rest of the movie is, if the ending is unsatisfying, that’s what the viewers remember and talk about. Fiction may be more forgiving, but I do think great films can teach us not to linger too long after the central question of the story’s been answered, to go out “with a bang, not a whimper.” 

 

 

Whether the ending is a freeze-frame image of the characters’ final, climactic decision in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid or Thelma and Louise, a single, memorable line after the heartbreaking goodbye in Casablanca, Roy Scheider and Richard Dreyfuss paddling home once the shark is dead in Jaws, or one heartwrenching look between teacher and student at the end of the defiant drum solo in Whiplash, films teach us to deliver an ending the whole story has been working towards, and not to diminish that moment by hanging around too long to wrap things up.

 

 

So, go ahead and watch your favorite movie. It might be the stuff novels are made of. 

 

---Wendall

 

 

 

Mystery's Magic Number

Sujata Massey

A crowded party is almost always considered successful. When the guests pile in and you can’t even reach the buffet, it means you are at a happening place. This is why there are maxims like, don't spread a party too thinly through a house and garden. Get everyone in the living room, or around the pool, so the energy explodes.

In books, it’s a different matter. Too many characters can subtly derail the story, no matter how necessary and fascinating they seem. The chief problem is readers forget who they are.

One of the biggest challenges for me as a writer is whittling down the characters coming to the party. It isn't until a book is close to done that I realize I allowed in too many characters.

I'm writing mysteries set in  Bombay. Even in 1921, the city was crowded. I can rationalize all the way from the docks to the hills that my story must have plenty of characters because that's the way that cities are. Regardless of time period, most mystery series have "regulars" reappearing in various books who might be fellow crime-solving associates, family members and friends, and the suspects. The trick is giving everyone just enough time--and vacations away, if they really don't serve a purpose in a particular story.

Daily activity in early 1900s Bombay

Right now, I’m working on a mystery set mostly in a Bombay college. I've been writing for almost a year. During this time, I've created five important undergraduates, five professors, two adminstrators, a college guard, two servants, and the college lawyer. That's 16 people--about half of the total number of players in the novel, which certainly includes protagonist Perveen Mistry, and Perveen's family and friends, police and legal figures.

This week I started a reducing plan, but only three have been cut so far. The process made me wonder whether there is a magic number of characters in a mystery.

I am too frantic to take time away from my book to read several others, so I took the easy route and spent 90 minutes streaming a high-quality mystery program. I am entranced by Endeavour, which features a young Inspector Endeavour Morse in 1960s Oxford. An excellent show in Season One, "Trove," had nineteen characters of note, with eight supplementary characters (aka extras) speaking just a line or two.

I felt like I followed it all brilliantly. A few days later, could I recount the names of the show's characters excepting Morse and his boss Fred Thursday?

Absolutely not. That is the big difference between visual and literary storytelling. Watching Endeavour, I only had to recognize a character by sight--and what others said about that person--to know who they were. 

There were some things, though, that Endeavour's writers did that led me to think about some self-improvement. There were rarely more than two characters of the same type--ie, two people who were friends, two people who were coworkers, a family unit such as mother and child. I could eliminate a few characters that are very similar. Do I really need four boys under the age of twenty? 

Another question I’ll ask myself is why each character needs to be in a novel.The most important characters are emotionally rich, not just information-givers. These are recurring players in Perveen’s life, or are people with enough suffering they might feel tempted to commit despicable acts, or shield such acts from knowledge.

Perveen is a lawyer, and I enjoy writing scenes where she is collecting secrets from various characters who've been disregarded by the British colonial authorities. Yet I realize Perveen can still learn about minor characters when other people narrate what they said. And fewer interviews mean fewer scenes, and the heavy cloud of cigar smoke begins to lift. 

Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None has a tight cast

I might throw a party when I finish writing this book. It will not be a standing-room-only bash: the kind of party that I would have loved twenty-five years ago. The gathering I'm thinking about it looks more like one of the early dinner parties in And Then There Were None. 

Not too large, and not too small.

And without terminal losses.