Monthly Archives: March 2010

News

Brian McDonald’s Invisible Ink Guide to Story Hits Print

If you’ve ever wanted proof that Seattle has a mysterious success-retardant effect in publishing, the case of Invisible Ink should do the trick. Screenwriter and story structure teacher Brian McDonald, a long-time Capitol Hill resident and good friend of mine, wrote his guide to story back in 2003. Then he shopped the book around for seven years. He went to publishers with to-kill-for quotes like these:

If I manage to reach the summit of my next story it will be in no small part due to having read Invisible Ink. (Pixar’s Andrew Stanton)

I recommend this fine handbook on craft to any writer, apprentice or professional, working in any genre or form. (Dr. Charles Johnson, National Book Award-winner)

I’ve sat down with at least a couple of dozen books that swore they could help me with my craft. Invisible Ink is the first one I’ve finished. (Aaron Elkins, Edgar Award-winner)

Not one publisher bit. There’s a scene in The Family Guy, the first episode back from cancellation, where Peter lists all the other failed shows that Family Guy had to “make room for.” It’s hilarious, but also sad. (Have fun! Create your own shortlist of books published since 2003 that didn’t need to be.)

But finally, Invisible Ink is available in paperback (Amazon, Barnes & Noble), and you can check out an online copy at Libertary.

It grew out of McDonald’s classes on screenwriting and story around town, at 911 Media Arts and Richard Hugo House, and his ongoing work with the animation program at the University of Washington. A friend of his, who used to write for Seinfeld, wrote a pilot for a TV show of his own and asked for notes. When he got through with McDonald’s comments, he said, “You should write a book.”

It also grew out of the hard-knocks life of a Seattle screenwriter, applying to contests and fellowships, waiting to hear back, and unsealing, often, letters of rejection.

Brian McDonald

“I was trying to get into the Disney Fellowship program, and one of the rejection letters they sent back came with a list of books I should read,” said McDonald. “I thought, I know all these books. I could write one of these books. So I did, partly out of anger. I had never written a book before so I didn’t know how to do it. I just based it on my classes. It’s what I teach at Pixar or Lucasfilm or wherever I happen to be.” Pixar is having him down for a repeat visit this April, and a longer, four-week course.

The key structural concept McDonald tries to get across is what he calls “armature” (not exactly what’s meant by theme) of the story. It’s not the one-line synopsis, but the heart of what you’re trying to say. This, not coincidentally, is what many, many writers struggle with putting into words. It’s hard enough to do it with someone else’s work, and that’s multiplied when you look at your own.

For McDonald, deciphering the structure of story has been a lifelong process. Some kids take apart televisions to see what makes them go. McDonald used to tape (with a cassette recorder) the Bob Newhart Show, Twilight Zone, and Mary Tyler Moore Show to see what made them tick. “It took me a long time to distill that into armature,” McDonald said.

Twilight Zone is remembered for Rod Serling’s ability to recast the morality play (“the good guy gets something good, or bad guy gets his comeuppance”) to include the paranoid tenor of the late ’50s and early ’60s. But “there’s a bigger idea at work” in each episode, noted McDonald, “like we should respect each individual.” That’s the armature, it defines the story, it lets a writer gauge what’s a relevant detail and what’s not.

For McDonald, “it doesn’t matter whether it’s a joke or a newspaper story,” the armature is what hearers, viewers, or readers rely on to make sense of a story. He’s strict about it. Name the last movie you saw with a fully functioning armature, I asked him. There was a long pause. “Last year? Nothing comes to mind.”

In Invisible Ink, he picks out The Wizard of Oz for special mention. He sums up that movie’s armature as, “We all may have what we’re looking for already,” and then details how scene after scene after scene supports that argument. He gets impatient with today’s writers, who “add extraneous things that don’t reinforce their armature. You chip away anything that’s not David. But they fall in love with a character or subplot and their point gets diluted.”

Realism is not the addition of irrelevant details. McDonald recounts what Charles Johnson told him once. “When a child tells you a story, they say we got up and got dressed and went to the movie and got ice cream and went home. But stories are about ‘because.’ That’s much more interesting than the ‘ands’.” He pauses. “There’s a lot of ‘ands’ in the movies right now.”

It’s not that storytellers today fail to entertain at all. McDonald just thinks that “stories with strong armature entertain across cultures and across time. So, the long money is on armature.”

I asked him to list his students’ top three bad habits.

  1. They write without having a point, without an armature, in the hope that one emerges. They hide behind their style. It’s such a beautifully written sentence, they think, who cares if it doesn’t say anything? What happens is, limping. People have a strong leg and a weak leg, they don’t put any weight on the bad leg. But their stories limp because they favor their strength.
  2. They try to impress other writers. A lot of writers write for critics or other writers rather than for a larger audience, they write to impress rather than to engage. Writers who engage (Michael Crichton, Stephen King) are thought of a cheap writers. But everyone would love to sell books in that volume, everyone wants people lined up around the block to see their movie. And critics tend to dismiss things that people enjoy.
  3. They’re too caught up with the goal to be original. That’s really tied up in the first two issues. You just work really hard and learn to tell a story really well, I tell them. The thing that’s original is the person who tells the story. Originality is an outcome of telling a story well and being honest to your experiences and perceptions.

So where do you get your armature ideas? “You can do both, find the idea in the situation, or the situation in the idea. Still, I can’t start writing a story until I know why I’m writing the story. The trick is if you do it right, no one will know which came first. If you don’t do it right [with an armature], your work will look mechanical and clunky. Without one, scenes meander, characters don’t matter, and your story goes nowhere. Many times, the writer discovers the idea at the end and expects the audience to care.”

McDonald keeps a running commentary of this sort on his  Invisible Ink blog. “The rules have gotten a bad rap, but mostly because someone uses the rules but executes them poorly. People say, ‘I saw that ending coming a mile away,’ or ‘I’ve seen this character before.’ But they tend not to point to classics.”

Literature

Brian McDonald’s Invisible Ink Guide to Story Hits Print

If you’ve ever wanted proof that Seattle has a mysterious success-retardant effect in publishing, the case of Invisible Ink should do the trick. Screenwriter and story structure teacher Brian McDonald, a long-time Capitol Hill resident and good friend of mine, wrote his guide to story back in 2003. Then he shopped the book around for seven years. He went to publishers with to-kill-for quotes like these:

If I manage to reach the summit of my next story it will be in no small part due to having read Invisible Ink. (Pixar’s Andrew Stanton)

I recommend this fine handbook on craft to any writer, apprentice or professional, working in any genre or form. (Dr. Charles Johnson, National Book Award-winner)

I’ve sat down with at least a couple of dozen books that swore they could help me with my craft. Invisible Ink is the first one I’ve finished. (Aaron Elkins, Edgar Award-winner)

Not one publisher bit. There’s a scene in The Family Guy, the first episode back from cancellation, where Peter lists all the other failed shows that Family Guy had to “make room for.” It’s hilarious, but also sad. (Have fun! Create your own shortlist of books published since 2003 that didn’t need to be.)

But finally, Invisible Ink is available in paperback (Amazon, Barnes & Noble), and you can check out an online copy at Libertary.

It grew out of McDonald’s classes on screenwriting and story around town, at 911 Media Arts and Richard Hugo House, and his ongoing work with the animation program at the University of Washington. A friend of his, who used to write for Seinfeld, wrote a pilot for a TV show of his own and asked for notes. When he got through with McDonald’s comments, he said, “You should write a book.”

It also grew out of the hard-knocks life of a Seattle screenwriter, applying to contests and fellowships, waiting to hear back, and unsealing, often, letters of rejection.

Brian McDonald

“I was trying to get into the Disney Fellowship program, and one of the rejection letters they sent back came with a list of books I should read,” said McDonald. “I thought, I know all these books. I could write one of these books. So I did, partly out of anger. I had never written a book before so I didn’t know how to do it. I just based it on my classes. It’s what I teach at Pixar or Lucasfilm or wherever I happen to be.” Pixar is having him down for a repeat visit this April, and a longer, four-week course.

The key structural concept McDonald tries to get across is what he calls “armature” (not exactly what’s meant by theme) of the story. It’s not the one-line synopsis, but the heart of what you’re trying to say. This, not coincidentally, is what many, many writers struggle with putting into words. It’s hard enough to do it with someone else’s work, and that’s multiplied when you look at your own.

For McDonald, deciphering the structure of story has been a lifelong process. Some kids take apart televisions to see what makes them go. McDonald used to tape (with a cassette recorder) the Bob Newhart Show, Twilight Zone, and Mary Tyler Moore Show to see what made them tick. “It took me a long time to distill that into armature,” McDonald said.

Twilight Zone is remembered for Rod Serling’s ability to recast the morality play (“the good guy gets something good, or bad guy gets his comeuppance”) to include the paranoid tenor of the late ’50s and early ’60s. But “there’s a bigger idea at work” in each episode, noted McDonald, “like we should respect each individual.” That’s the armature, it defines the story, it lets a writer gauge what’s a relevant detail and what’s not.

For McDonald, “it doesn’t matter whether it’s a joke or a newspaper story,” the armature is what hearers, viewers, or readers rely on to make sense of a story. He’s strict about it. Name the last movie you saw with a fully functioning armature, I asked him. There was a long pause. “Last year? Nothing comes to mind.”

In Invisible Ink, he picks out The Wizard of Oz for special mention. He sums up that movie’s armature as, “We all may have what we’re looking for already,” and then details how scene after scene after scene supports that argument. He gets impatient with today’s writers, who “add extraneous things that don’t reinforce their armature. You chip away anything that’s not David. But they fall in love with a character or subplot and their point gets diluted.”

Realism is not the addition of irrelevant details. McDonald recounts what Charles Johnson told him once. “When a child tells you a story, they say we got up and got dressed and went to the movie and got ice cream and went home. But stories are about ‘because.’ That’s much more interesting than the ‘ands’.” He pauses. “There’s a lot of ‘ands’ in the movies right now.”

It’s not that storytellers today fail to entertain at all. McDonald just thinks that “stories with strong armature entertain across cultures and across time. So, the long money is on armature.”

I asked him to list his students’ top three bad habits.

  1. They write without having a point, without an armature, in the hope that one emerges. They hide behind their style. It’s such a beautifully written sentence, they think, who cares if it doesn’t say anything? What happens is, limping. People have a strong leg and a weak leg, they don’t put any weight on the bad leg. But their stories limp because they favor their strength.
  2. They try to impress other writers. A lot of writers write for critics or other writers rather than for a larger audience, they write to impress rather than to engage. Writers who engage (Michael Crichton, Stephen King) are thought of a cheap writers. But everyone would love to sell books in that volume, everyone wants people lined up around the block to see their movie. And critics tend to dismiss things that people enjoy.
  3. They’re too caught up with the goal to be original. That’s really tied up in the first two issues. You just work really hard and learn to tell a story really well, I tell them. The thing that’s original is the person who tells the story. Originality is an outcome of telling a story well and being honest to your experiences and perceptions.

So where do you get your armature ideas? “You can do both, find the idea in the situation, or the situation in the idea. Still, I can’t start writing a story until I know why I’m writing the story. The trick is if you do it right, no one will know which came first. If you don’t do it right [with an armature], your work will look mechanical and clunky. Without one, scenes meander, characters don’t matter, and your story goes nowhere. Many times, the writer discovers the idea at the end and expects the audience to care.”

McDonald keeps a running commentary of this sort on his  Invisible Ink blog. “The rules have gotten a bad rap, but mostly because someone uses the rules but executes them poorly. People say, ‘I saw that ending coming a mile away,’ or ‘I’ve seen this character before.’ But they tend not to point to classics.”

Sports

For One Day, We Cared About Hockey. Well, One Afternoon, Really.

U.S.A! U.S.A! The Game Goes to Overtime

My friend David and I often plan gatherings around sporting events. Sometimes–as was the case for our Poinsettia Bowl party–no one shows. Sunday afternoon was different. The USA v. Canada Gold Medal hockey game proved a big draw, as our ten-person group spilled across two different tables at Ballard’s best Upper-Midwest-themed bar, Zayda Buddy’s.

And all of us got to experience one of the most thrilling moments in Olympic history–U.S. winger Zach Parise’s game-tying goal with just 24 seconds left in regulation. Much of the credit goes to Parise, but let us not forget the contributions of my friend Jason, who chugged a Miller High Life just before the goal was scored in honor of U.S. goalie Ryan Miller. 

I’d arrived at noon, wearing a blue sweater and “Git ‘er Done” cap, in order to secure a table. Wise move, as all tables were gone shortly after the 12:30 p.m. face-off. David arrived shortly before the game in a cowboy hat. Beers were ordered, the mysteries of the “blue line” and the “power play” explained, and general shouting at the T.V. commenced. My friend Saira was particularly into the game, having engaged in a shouting match with some anti-U.S. Canadians the night before in Vancouver. “They were jerks,” she asserted more than once.

You know how the game turned out, so let’s talk about those last thrilling seconds of regulation. I am not a hockey fan; in fact, yesterday’s game is probably the first hockey game I’ve watched in its entirely in ten years. Having said that: There is nothing in sports as exciting as the last minute of a hockey game in which one team is leading by a single goal. The tension is unbearable as the trailing team assumes an offensive advantage by pulling their goalie. Shot after dangerous shot heads toward the net, which each deflection holding the promise of a breakout by the defense for an empty net goal that would seal the game. Fantastic stuff.

And when your team manages to score that tying goal–well, at Zayda Buddy, it was pandemonium. Jumping, hugging, spontaneous chants of U-S-A! U-S-A! A friend walking though Fremont knew the goal was scored when she heard a huge eruption from Dad Watson’s.

The sudden-death overtime period was no less tense, but Canada put together a better attack and won with a simple little give-and-go play to young star Sidney Crosby. The bar fell completely silent. Checks were asked for, beers downed, sympathy attempted. “It’s okay because Canada was the better team,” said friend Mark. “We put up a good fight.”

We all piled out into the sunny afternoon, some to engage in “drunk gardening,” others to complete much-needed chores. I headed to Gasworks with a friend to throw a football around. Too bad there’s not an Olympics for that.

Team USA hockey can get their revenge at the Black Sea resort town of Sochi, Russia, four years from now at the 2014 Olympics. Until then, we don’t hold out much hope for good attendance at one of our hockey parties.

News

The Ninth Anniversary of the Nisqually Quake

February 28, 2001, at 10:54 a.m., a 6.8 “intraslab” earthquake shook the Puget Sound region for about 45 seconds. The Nisqually quake‘s focus was some 32 miles deep, in the Cascadia subduction zone. It might seem like things have been quiet since then, but as the graphic from the Pacific Northwest Seismic Network illustrates, we live with minor quakes almost daily.

It’s the effects of major earthquakes that are on everyone’s mind recently, though. Andrew Rivkin, writing for the New York Times‘ Dot Earth, emphasizes that the news from Chile should spur preparations in the Northwest. “The Pacific ‘ring of fire‘ doesn’t stop at the equator,” he writes. In this or the next generation, the Northwest will likely experience a megathrust quake similar to Chile’s, which tend to generate tsunamis.

We tend to consider the averages of megathrust quakes over the centuries as their periodicity, but Chile’s last megathrust quake was only 50 years ago.

As much as we talk about the “Big One” on the way, there are still troubling lapses. King County’s emergency preparedness page specifically mentions bioterrorism, floods, and flu…not earthquakes.

The Seattle Channel has earthquake safety videos, and the city offers ongoing training programs, but when you search on “earthquake kit,” the first page with the elements of a disaster kit was last updated in 1999. The pdf on “How to Prepare for Earthquakes” has a total of four bullet points on things you can do beforehand, including one sentence about keeping supplies in the home. Another piece of advice is to stop driving in an earthquake.

Here’s SFGate’s extensive earthquake kit suggestions. Trust the Californians. UPDATE: Or, trust the Red Cross.