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T.V. writing / comedy writing / drama / dramatic irony / future / how-to / jokes / screenwriting — No Comments
17
Nov 09

Your Story Boils Down To One Joke

Your story is one joke. Even if it lasts 10 seasons. It’s one joke. At least — it should be if your Prius is running on all fuel cells. Whether you’re writing comedy or drama, your entire premise boils down to “. . . but the joke’s on them.” Where “them” = your main characters.

The joke isn’t necessarily funny. But it has that thing that all jokes share: surprise. We start in one world, and we wind up in another, with the old world blown up in our face. That’s what a joke is. When it’s short and tight and sharp, it’s funny. When it depends on context and character, it’s dramatic irony.

Dramatic irony is what happens when we know more than the characters do — because we know them better than they know themselves. Because we perceive something in the situation they don’t. Because we’ve picked up clues they’ve missed. So the joke is on them: they strive, struggle, blithely unaware of what’s about to happen. And we enjoy it. Because when we know more than they do, tension builds as we watch them struggle to find out what we know — because the joke’s on them. And we win. We’re in the superior position.

Dramatic irony happens when a character doesn’t know he’s in a joke, and he’s surprised by the punchline.

Dramatic irony is the joke your character finds least funny right now. Because we want them to suffer. Because that’s what we find funny — or alarming — or affecting — or profound.

Your character may run into variations of the same joke over and over, or she may live out the consequences of the joke slowly over the course of the story. The joke must be clear, and your entire story must boil down to this one joke. To test this, see if you can answer “how is the joke on them?” about your story. Here are some examples:

People survive a plane crash only to fight for their lives against mysterious Others who force them to confront their past lives. (LOST) (joke’s on them.)

A boss loves his office like family but taints everything in it with his incompetence. (THE OFFICE) (joke’s on him — and the other people in his office.)

Humans create a race of machines who now want to destroy them. (BATTLESTAR GALACTICA) (joke’s on them.)

These are TV examples, but it works for all stories.

Distill your story to its essential joke — ask how is this situation a joke on them? — and then repeat that same joke on a larger and larger scale, with greater consequences, until you reach your conclusion or 100th episode. Here’s my post on how to tell a joke.

Telling jokes keeps you tight and light on your feet. And it’s fun. Try it.

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7
Sep 09

What DuChamp Could Have Done With YouTube

Information wants to be free, it wants to be traded and exchanged; stories want to be told. Human society’s based on it: we connect to one another by telling stories, trading information, and we resist any barriers to that trade (like download fees). Information that’s hoarded becomes less valuable because information’s value is in the sharing. It does a band no good to demand money for music no one has heard, nor for a T.V. show or author, etc.

The next step in sharing information is making it your own: there’s a theory that when ancient Greek storytellers recited the Iliad, half-lines were left incomplete so they could improvise. What we now know as “The Iliad” is what rose to the top as the best version–ancient crowd-sourcing. Opening up stories so that the audience can participate–by remixing, mashing, fan-fic’ing, inventing mythologies, maintaining histories, and forming sub-cultures–is what’s going to keep our stories fresh, flexible, and yes, free. The best will rise to the top.

This is from a great article about downloads from a blog called “Confused of Calcutta: A blog about information”:

The point is actually something else. It’s about culture. It’s about the way the millenials think and act. They have rediscovered something we’ve gone and forgotten, the sheer pleasure of getting under the hood of things. Making things. Making new things out of old things. Changing things.

This process of make, remake, change is part of the way they express themselves. Part of the way they think. Part of the way they create. Part of the way they protest.

Marcel Duchamp remixed the Mona Lisa. Ogden Nash remixed Joyce Kilmer’s Trees. Lampoon and Satire are culturally significant as well, no less creative than other forms of expression. If you haven’t done so already, go read Cory Doctorow’s Makers and Larry Lessig’s Remix. They will help you understand more of what is happening.

via Thinking about downloads – confused of calcutta.

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7
Jul 09

Socialstructing

Great article about the rise of social capital in business. Book writers are definitely becoming a type of peasant-class where we thrive via dense social networks rather than formal economic structures.

“Social capital has served a critical role in the economic life of the Soviet Union and continues to do so in many poorer countries today. Teodor Shanin, an eminent sociologist, has invented a field of study called “peasantology,” which looks at how people survive in informal economies. Shanin argues that peasants inhabit an economic structure entirely different from either capitalism or socialism. The key element of the peasant economic structure is the existence of dense and vibrant social and family networks that provide members access to necessary resources. Researchers observed the phenomenon first in Africa years ago where they could not find any economic explanation for how the majority of the population survived. They didn’t own land. They didn’t seem to have any assets. ….”

via Socialstructing: Bringing Social Back into Our Economy and Organizations – Boing Boing .

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6
Jul 09

Cory Doctorow: Cheap Facts and the Plausible Premise

Apparently, in an age of free information, writers will be the new inventors:

“New warfare expert John Robb coined the term “plausible premise” to describe the new reality of  ”open source insurgencies” (“insurgency composed of many small groups without any hierarchical leadership or organizational structure that typifies 20th century practice”). Open source insurgencies don’t run on detailed instructional manuals that describe tactics and techniques. Rather, they run on a master narrative about how insurgency may be conducted — as screenwriter John Rogers put it:

What you really need is a plausible premise. i.e. “You can kill US soldiers with IEDs.” and then the new Interconnected Marketplace Of Shitty Evil Ideas will solve the problem for anyone looking to kill US soldiers with IEDs.

Or, more succinctly, in order to get the marketplace off its ass to solve the impossible, you have to just pull off the highly improbable and make sure everybody knows about it. Show it can be done, show how you did it, and watch the “marketplace” attack because you’ve made the “premise” “plausible.”

But this doesn’t just work for insurgents — it works for anyone working to effect change or take control of her life. Tell someone that her car has a chip-based controller that can be hacked to improve gas mileage, and you give her the keywords to feed into Google to find out how to do this, where to find the equipment to do it — even the firms that specialize in doing it for you.

In the age of cheap facts, we now inhabit a world where knowing something is possible is practically the same as knowing how to do it.”

Cory Doctorow via Locus Online Perspectives: Cory Doctorow: Cheap Facts and the Plausible Premise.

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28
Jun 09

10 Sci Fi Books That Launched Their Own Genres

Great article here about 10 sci fi books that launched their own genres:

http://io9.com/5302367/science-fiction-books-that-launched-their-own-genres?skyline=true&s=i

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26
Jun 09

Cyber-War

From the BBC:

What rules apply in cyber-wars?

Digital Planet
Alka Marwaha
BBC World Service

“The 2007 attacks in Estonia were launched via a botnet, a network of computers that have been subverted by malicious code so they fall under someone else’s control.

At the conference, a couple of graduates from the University of Bonn in Germany showed off a technique they had developed to counter the effects of botnets.

Botnets are networks of computers which have been subverted by malicious code so they fall under someone else’s control.

The legal and political frameworks that exist around the world, haven’t quite yet caught up to these technological realities
Cyrus Faviar

Owners of machines forming a botnet typically do not know their computer has been hijacked and home users account for 95% of all attacks mounted by botnets, according to figures from security firm Symantec.

“These two graduate students basically said, we now know how to counter-attack these botnets, we can undo them and use their own software against them.

“However, whilst they may want to launch their counter-attack against a botnet, they might want to counter these effects, as there are legal issues that they have to deal with first,” said Mr Farivar

“The legal and political frameworks that exist around the world, haven’t quite yet caught up to these technological realities,” he added.”

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26
Jun 09

Sci Fi in Other Countries

I’m writing Sci Fi (sort of) right now–a “Fringe” spec and my new novel is a bit of a literary urban sci fi fantasy.

So I found this article about what’s going on in science fiction in other languages very interesting:
“But to answer the question properly – what are we missing out on – my own regret is that I don’t get to read French steampunk!

I know there’s a lot of it – I did a panel on steampunk a few years ago in Nantes and it was horrible, being surrounded by steampunk writers telling me about their (very cool sounding) books and I can’t read any of them! I’d also love to see some of the Chinese SF novels, and at least get a glimpse into the Arabic SF that’s being published. I’d love to read some of the Cuban stuff… stop me when you’ve had enough. Israel has some very interesting home-grown YA fantasy at the moment. To be honest, the way I get to read non-Anglophone writers is mostly in the crime genre, which seems to be a lot more open to translating in the field – so the Cuban or Japanese or French writers I do read are crime writers – check out Detectives Beyond Borders, which is a great introduction. But I think things are changing in science fiction and fantasy a little, too. Certainly, since I started the World SF Blog I’ve been amazed by how much was out there – in English – translations from Korean and Spanish, writers who occasionally sell an English story but work predominantly in other languages, and a huge amount of articles, blog posts, online communities, a great deal of discussion, from people around the world who are simply passionate about the genre and want others to know about it, too. The problem with the old model of World SF was that it was Anglophone-led, but now it’s not! The Internet’s been a major catalyst in that regard. A few years ago, three German fans started InterNova, which was meant to be a magazine of international SF. They only managed to do one issue, and it was plagued with distribution problems, but the remarkable thing about it was that the initiative came from the outside, and the contributors, editors, proof-readers, translators – everyone involved – was likewise from the non-English world. And that was quite remarkable to me, this idea that you can do this, you don’t need one of the old English writers or editors to do it for you. You can do it yourself.”

MIND MELD: Guide to International SF/F (Part I )

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