A.J. Sweeney strikes again

That fang-toothed hussy has been busy lately. As usual, she's been shamelessly flogging my writing to any number of magazines and brazenly claiming credit for it. She's sidled up to the following publications, batting her lashes and whispering in their ears until she gets what she wants...

The Horror Zine
Bards & Sages Quarterly
SNM Horror Magazine

Her story in The Horror Zine made Editor's Pick this month -- whose editor Jeani Rector called it "original and awesome" -- and placed third in SNM's October Opiates issue. Third! Ha! She'll never be number one. She'll have to kill me first.

Dark Water(s), Withholding, and Point of View

For whatever reason, I decided this past week that I really needed to see both versions of Dark Water. (Maybe because it's been so rainy lately?) I picked up both Hideo Nakata's 2002 original and the 2005 American remake.

Watching these two different approaches to the same story turned out to be really helpful for me in terms of thinking about how character point-of-view can add to or detract from horror in storytelling.

The Hideo Nakata version of Dark Water allows the main/mother character (Yoshimi, played by Hitomi Kuroki) to see the ghost and interact with it far earlier than Walter Salles' version allows Jennifer Connelly's Dahlia to. Yoshimi sees the ghost about fifteen minutes into the film, whereas Dahlia doesn't see anything supernatural until almost the very end. Instead, Salles has her little girl, Ceci, see and interact with the ghost for most of the film, which has several unfortunate side-effects. First, allowing the child a privileged POV vis-a-vis the ghost is something we see all too often in horror films, and therefore feels hackneyed and trite. Second, it doesn't necessarily pay off in the specific context of the film. This is supposed to be Dahlia/Yoshimi's story, so to rob her of agency by not allowing her to see the ghost lessens its impact overall.

By contrast, confining the ghost to Yoshimi's POV in the J-horror version calls her mental stability into question in a much more effective way than Salles/Connelly's dull, repetitive neurotic shriekings at, say, an unfinished load of laundry. The audience has far more empathy for poor Yoshimi, who is seeing horrifying visions, than it does for Dahlia, who merely comes off as alternately whiny and strident for most of the film because essentially the only thing that's really bothering her is a drip in her ceiling. Oh, yes, and her flashbacks to her childhood.

Which brings me to another point: these flashbacks, as well as some other really obvious scenes in the Salles film, hammer home their points a little too hard. In the Hideo Nakata film, we are told obliquely that Yoshimi had a neglectful mother; in Salles' version, we are told this explicitly, and repeatedly, as though he doesn't trust his audience to make any connections for themselves.

Finally, one last little gripe I have with the writing in this film is that it is riddled with missed opportunities. The writers let things be far too easy for Dahlia. For example, when she is late to pick up Ceci from school because of a job interview, there are absolutely no consequences. She shows up late and kindergarten teacher Camryn Manheim cheerfully says, "Oh no worries, we put her in the after-school program." Little Ceci is happily reading a story with her fellow future latchkey kids. Phew! Good thing that scene ended comfortably! I'd hate for there to be any conflict in this story. In Nakata's version, the child's father ends up taking her home from school, and a bitter parental fight subsequently ensues.

Everything just comes so easily to Dahila. In her job interview she is hired on the spot. Yoshimi runs out of the interview to pick up her child and doesn't find out until later that she actually got it anyway. Oh, and a little reality-based nit-pick? Dahila is a former copy-editor who gets a job as a lab assistant at a radiology clinic. With absolutely no medial training. "I've always been interested in medicine." "You're hired!" Sure, why not? I mean, maybe in the heady pre-recession days of 2005 you could just waltz into a doctor's office and demand a job, I don't know. Seems to sound a bit of a false note to me. Anyway. Minor gripe. But it does relate to the writers' total inability to allow Dahlia to feel anything really serious at all for basically the first hour of the film.

Which brings me back to the concept of POV, and withholding information.

Why do Salles et al not allow Dahlia to get into anything honestly frightening for such a very long time?

I think perhaps they were trying too hard to create atmosphere and maintain suspense, all at the expense of storytelling.

As a writer, I find I am very often afraid to give too much away lest I undercut the Mystery of It All. The writers of Salles' Dark Water seemed to suffer from this same insecurity. Certainly withholding some information is necessary for suspenseful storytelling, to an extent, but so then is revelation. Let them see the bomb under the table for goodness sake. By withholding so very much in the first hour of the film, the American version just ended up boring the pants off me.

Extended scenes of Dahlia and Ceci on the Roosevelt Island tram, at the lawyer's office, at school, in the apartment, etc. began to wear me down. The scene where they view their potential new apartment seemed to be filmed in real time. Without an ounce of exaggeration, I've seen actual New York City apartments in less time than it took John C. Reilly to show us the one in Dark Water (his best lines in this scene: "There's the stove. There's the dishwasher."). As a result, the pacing in this film suffered terribly. Which is a shame, because the last 45 minutes of the movie actually weren't bad. It's amazing how easily I can see this in someone else's story and yet I commit this same error constantly while writing my own. Scene after scene of exposition and atmosphere-establishing clog the beginnings of my stories despite the fact that I must have been told to start in medias res about a thousand times.

Suddenly it became clear to me how POV and info withholding (and by extension, pacing) are intimately entwined. If you deny your main character access to the world of the story by overly restricting his/her point of view, you'll end up excessively withholding information, and a delayed story-start will be the inevitable consequence. Yes, you can certainly give secondary characters information and integrate them into the storyline but you've got to remember who your main character is and not lose sight of that.

Again, I think the temptation with writing horror is to withhold excessively out of fear of losing suspense or coming off as unsophisticated. But the alternative -- a boring 60 minutes of watching Jennifer Connelly on the phone with her landlord -- is much, much worse.

Sprucing up the old homestead

I hope you like Spinster's re-design. I'm rather fond of it. It works in tandem with my new site, A.J. Sweeney, which I am now using as a semi-official "author site" to showcase my pretty little tales of death and murder, most of which were written under that pen name, and www.andreajanes.com has had an awesome new face-lift, courtesy of the kickass web-designer Oleg Jelezniakov at OJ Works. Spinster Aunt will remain, as ever, a place for me to get cranky online. I feel positively modern.

Dale Carnegie and me

I've always kind of ignored Dale Carnegie. I never really wanted to win friends, or, you know, influence people, so I kind of figured I didn't need him. Then I stumbled across a book at a relative's house called "How to Stop Worrying and Start Living" and the title amused me so I picked it up -- I admit it -- ironically. Me, the big city big shot, flipping through ole Dale Carnegie's moth-riddled homilies and laughing at chapter titles like, "When life gives you lemons, make a lemonade"! Oh, those old-timey 1940s people, they were soooo funneeee! And then, as poetic justice would have it, I got my comeuppance. I couldn't stop reading the goddamn thing. I even took it on the subway. People saw me reading it. Yeah, they saw it. They saw the title and everything. And I didn't care!

See, the thing is, Dale Carnegie is completely and utterly badass! They ought to call this book, "Shut the fuck up and stop whining, you pussy!" It would sell a lot more copies. Seriously. There are case studies where people are like, "When I was stranded on a raft in the South Pacific for 22 days, I realized something..." and "On the beaches of Normandy I finally managed to cure my insomnia" or "After an operation that restored my sight, I wept when I saw the tiny rainbows in a soap bubble as I was doing the dishes, and I never complained about boredom again." These are just paraphrases of course. The real quotes are much more devastating and awesome (lots of wars and excellent Great Depression stuff). You see, essentially, the book tells you to stop worrying because, probably, you have nothing to worry about. I mean, if you're an American (or North American, or Westerner in general) and you're not impoverished (like, food stamps and foreclosures poor, not I-can't-afford-a-daily-latte poor) and have all your limbs and your sight, and you don't have cancer, then you have absolutely nothing in the world to complain about. It's all trivia. And de minimis non curat lex, dude. The law does not concern itself with trifles.

What, you may be asking yourself, oh gentle reader, is the point of this post? Generally the Spinster does not dispense advice. (Though now that I am venturing into this territory, if only for one single outing, I'm glad it could be of the decidedly old-fashioned and non namby-pamby variety.) I guess I just wanted to do something nice for once. This book, despite some of it's more bizarre advice (e.g. you don't need sleep; you must believe in god or you're screwed, etc.) is kind of amazing. So if you've gotten to the point where you're tired of the sound of your own voice complaining about shit, go get a copy of this book. It's verrry soothing.

Oh, and for all the writers out there -- everything in HTSWASL goes double for you.

All right, that's enough of my soft side. Let us never speak of this again.

Writing Bits

Since I've been remiss in getting my links up on my website, here are a few to tide over my raging torrent of fans.

Fiction

Nethermead A woman walking in Prospect Park meets someone unexpected.

A Fitting Tribute A young girl designs her own tomb! Featuring haunted wigs!*

The Attraction A story about a time machine, and the one person who must never use it.

Morbus A tale of greed... and cholera! (Note: you actually have to pay for this story! PDFs cost $2, print editions cost $5)*

* Highly recommended for young adult readers.

Non-fiction

Interview with Corinne May Botz

Film Reviews

Sleeping Beauty

The Secret Beyond the Door

Ladies make the best scenarists

This article about Dana Fox, Diablo Cody, Liz Meriwether and Lorene Scafaria in today's NYT makes me want to assemble a dream team of screenwriter-girlfriends to hold my purses during premieres. (I wonder if Karen McCullah Lutz and Kirsten Smith would let be be on their team ... or maybe just run errands for them.) The article goes into Cody's writing process a little bit -- you know, beyond the rhyming dictionary -- and she admits to crying up to four times in a working day.

I think the average writing day for me goes a bit like this: coffee, reading, breakfast, procrastinating, elevenses, pacing around room with tape recorder and heart palpitations, lunch, a nice walk, some Actual Writing, afternoon tea, more Actual Writing, this time with talking aloud as my characters, cocktails, a light supper, a movie, any movie, just something to get me out of the house, a late dinner, and nightcap. No tears, but much cracking myself up at jokes which later prove to be unfunny. Note also the ratio of six parts eating to two parts writing.

Now I'm just sitting here thinking who I'd like on my dream team, and I can only conclude that first and foremost it would have to be Liz Lemon.

White Pages

Screenplays have gotten shorter in the past half-century or so. A modern screenplay averages 100 pages in length, and a sign of good writing now is leaving plenty of "white on the page."

It wasn't always so. In the '40s, as talking pictures began to hit their stride, screenplays were rather lengthy and wordy, or at least they would seem to be by today's standards (I don't have any screenplays from the earliest talkies, but I might update this later if I get my hands on one).

This Preston Sturges script for The Lady Eve clocks in at 200 pages. Now, it's a shooting script, so it contains scene directions and other things which wouldn't be in a spec script, or even an earlier draft. But it's still fairly representative:


The sluglines look different, but otherwise the formatting is still basically the same. The major difference one notices when reading a Sturges script is how detailed the scene descriptions are.

In Chinatown, we see something much closer to what we're used to. Again, this appears to be a shooting script, so some of the scene description is allowable in a way that it wouldn't be in a spec, but still, it's very, very detailed: In case it's too small to see, the paragraph says, "Gittes stares at her. He's been charged with anger and when Evelyn says this it explodes. He hits her full in the face. Evelyn stares back at him. The blow has forced tears from her eyes, but she makes no move, not even to defend herself."

In a contemporary script, 40-Year-Old Virgin, we have scene description in its current incarnation :
This is what is now considered an acceptable amount of prose on a page.

I'm not sure I have an opinion one way or another -- I'm a skimmer rather than a reader myself, so I actually enjoy not having to read a lot of description -- but I just find it interesting to chart the evolution. There's a fine line between overwriting and trying to get a prose style to convey your story ideas, and the line seems to be getting finer and finer, as we strive to use the fewest words possible. It kind reminds me of the old joke, "Brevity is ... wit."

Writing by Committee: A Lesson from Top Chef

At many points throughout the creative process, a writer finds herself in the position of taking advice from friends, colleagues, editors, and higher-ups about her work. Watching Top Chef last night, I couldn't help but notice the parallels between the chef/sous chef dynamic, and the way a writer interacts with these well-intentioned advice givers.

First let's take a look at Carla. She took a lot of advice from her sous chef, and it ended up destroying her meal and costing her the game. What's truly sad is that she could have easily won it if she's stayed true to her own style of cooking, which the judges had praised again and again. Carla's personal unique stamp was what they loved -- her passion and soul shone through, and when she took too much of her sous' advice, it cost her everything. The moral? You're in charge, ultimately (unless you're being paid to write for someone, in which case you better do what they say). If you know your voice is strong and your writing is good, and everyone has told you so, then don't take advice from random people who may be ill-informed and also not really get what it is you're doing.

On the other hand, you have Stefan. He should have taken his sous chef's opinion to heart. His sous knew that freezing salmon to create carpaccio-thin slices was a bad idea and it was. It watered down the dish and completely ruined the intense pleasure of eating a fresh, raw piece of fish. It wasn't clear if the sous chef actually forewarned him or if he kept his mouth shut, but knowing Stefan's headstrong overconfidence, he wouldn't have listened anyway. But you have to know when to listen. Think about it: melting ice = water. It makes sense. If something makes sense logically, maybe you should pay attention to it.

Finally, we have Hosea, who did exactly right. He picked his teammate knowing his track record, and allowed him to contribute his strengths while maintaining control over the big picture and final product. This is exactly how to take advice when you're writing. Listen to people you trust, respect and admire and allow them to contribute in areas where you know they excel but always remember that it's your project and you're in charge. If, like poor Carla, you know your voice is the one people want to hear, don't let anyone else interfere. She was really the nicest person on the show as well as an excellent chef, and I wanted her to win.

Don't let writing by committee ruin a perfectly good thing.

(All the above advice is null and void if you're being paid to write something for someone. Then you're a hired hand and you better give them what they want. Spec scripts are all yours though, baby. Why bother obeying all the "rules" if you're not getting paid anyway? You won't sell something that sounds like everything everyone else ever wrote.)

I think I know who the dead weight is here

Rob and I are co-authoring our first article ... RIGHT NOW!

It goes a little something like this:

A: What do you mean by this sentence?
R: I mean what it says.

(Pause)

A: Is there another word for "thing"?
R: (silence -- he's checking the fantasy football index)
A: I can't DO THIS!
R: What?
A: When this is over, can we never do this again?
R: Yes.