Do You?

The guidance is outside
You just have to say it so
It's been years
Will you still deny it, no no
Love will die and love will go

You'll still remain then
Squeeze it into your eyes
You'll still feel then
When you saw this weakness in the skies
Thought that was you, that you'd fly

Now you know that isn't true
All your dreamings rally on for you
Seen some years
Been those years when your words came true
But everything I feel's just a clue

I feel you've already been there
Not what it means to be here
The only difference is what
Might be is now and that much freer
Well you know their faces are clear

The windows are wide open
That you're staring wide-eyed from
It's always better at home
That's why we work a bit and some
We need the money to come and come

I'm so drunk i don't care if
You killed me right now
C'mon you're alive
Now you'll know it's true and how
All the songs under a violin bow

Are never for real
It's always better a holiday
So much better a holiday
So much better that way, oh!
You're gonna make somebody love you

Well do ya, do ya do ya wanna
Wanna wanna go
Where I've never met you before?
Do ya wanna wanna go
Where you've never never seen you before?

Do you?

A Shade Of Solecism

In the process of understanding this wide world, a strange inner transformation comes to fruition. Just like Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, the expenditure of energy in observing something changes the observation. The world we learn about is only the world that includes us, and the world there is is made up of people who change it continuously. What we can learn is what it is, but the mistake would be in trying to teach ourselves what it could have been instead of understanding it for what it was.

[caption id="" align="alignright" width="240" caption="Rites of passage"][/caption]

I learnt of the world outside my window by writing. When I write things and hit "Save", an exuberance sweeps over me that signifies that something has been said and set in stone, that something cannot be changed and for every moment that comes after it, it is embellished deeper and deeper in the murk of history. For that reason, I can't let anything be wrong. I want my footprints on history's pages to be picture-perfect. It's not something I'm pretending to be - it's only something I know I can be and am trying my best to be so. In order to make correctness a habit, I read, I discover, I interpret. Reading and discovering can happen over and over again, without interpretation they will remain useless as time passes. Our mark does not lie in understanding that darkness is darkness and the light is the light; it lies in being able to light a candle without regard to whatever winds may be blowing then.

However, as the writer writes more and more, there is more and more about the world that is new, that is there in the now but wasn't in the then. If this moment has been prepared for, then disillusionment can be spared in favour of understanding, as has been noted that to attempt to learn is futile if understanding is absent. The prevalence of a loss of context forces a delineation on the matter of "understanding": to say that one understands is to not have integrated the ability to recognize, disintegrate and recreate, but to have only remembered the meaning encapsulated therein.

As much as contributions are expedited, so much is the world changed, and the world of the minute before understands its retirement just so. I, who have learnt much in this process of writing and self-discovery, am now a different man than of the minute before and have cast over my understanding of the world then a shade of solecism. The greatest lesson, therefore, does not concern the contents of our learning but the methodology itself: not what we learn, but how we learn. By integrating the idea that the spinning top spins so because tops spin so, we do not graduate from being fools. We must learn why it spins so. A top spinning the moment past will grind to a clumsy halt, but in setting another in motion is our learning vindicated.

Damage Assessment (EWP)

Note: This article is part of the EWP

--

Creative spark

The escalation of commitment can be quite a dreadful thing. Just a little more than a week ago, I set out to write a short story simply because I felt like writing fiction. Drawing inspiration from Thomas Pynchon’s ‘Against The Day’ and the names of particles in the Standard Model of particle physics (along with a working knowledge of the LHC at CERN), I first set out a simple header-plot (which is what I call the template from which I work upward). Once that was done, I checked it to see if it read well. It did.

Great! The next step was to define the characters’ personas, which, for me, doesn’t take much time because I ‘wing’ it (yes, you read that right), as I do the plot itself. The only things I decide beforehand are the only things I really enjoy deciding in the short-run: the names of the characters and the locales. Anyway, on the 7th of March, I began to write my story. (Download: session I)

Incomplete inspiration – hallucinating an abundance of opportunities – willingness to experiment – hesitation to lay out full plot

Reality hits

After two days or so, I realized to my horror that my narrative was going full speed ahead while the dialogue and character and plot developments were going nowhere. Back then, I had recently been criticized for indulging myself with too much prose at the risk of turning the whole endeavour pedantic and droll-like. In order to set it right, I scrolled back to the top of the page and began to edit what I’d written.

You see, I don’t edit my works much. I understand how an article or a story can be polished again and again and how there are so many techniques for that, but I’m a hesitating pacifist – and that means I get angry first and then calm down. So, if I gave myself time to calm down, I’d probably come up with something extremely blunt and literarily non-penetrating. Now, since I was editing this story, I began to have a bad feeling about it. My ideas and my intentions change so much within the same ideological bounds that there was a chance for a paragraph to turn out like a semantic singsong. (Download: session II)

Celebratory indulgence – brakes applied suddenly – improper attitude towards editing – thinking faster than writing

Battle for revival

The third challenge, and also the last one, I was left to confront now was the scripture of dialogues. I’d sucked at it in the past and had always strived to keep it at a minimum. Now, however, since the story seemed to be going good even though an indication of sunk costs was beginning to present itself, I decided to go for it.

Now, there are two kinds of dialogues that I’ve observed in stories. The first is between two people who are both active participators in the contents of the talk. This is the easiest to write because all you have to do is a conversation with yourself (which writers and philosophers do a lot) and then break it into two halves, one for each interlocutor. The second type is when two people are talking but only one of them is actually paying any heed to what’s being discussed, a type that is very important in most books written because if everyone listened to what was being spoken, there wouldn’t be a plot worth expounding for reams on. If you read the draft, you’ll be able to easily deduce that I struggled at writing the lines. (Download: session III)

Over-analysis – struggling to generate "flow" – very systematic approach

Desperate experimentation

The two ensuing sections of the story were actually written in the neighbourhood of 00:00, March 13, and opened up my eyes to the mistake I was doing: it seemed that if I started to script the dialogues, I was reluctant to take up the narrative, and if I started to script the narrative, I was reluctant to take up the dialogues. This resulted in conspicuous fault lines appearing all over the text – discernible easily to the reader to the point of him being able to read my mind, to the point of my work of “fiction” becoming transparent to his eyes. Also, in order to mask my own logical proclivities – which are strong enough as it is – I took the trouble to NOT be aware of the whole plot myself. This, in turn, awarded me with the liberty to experiment with what the two characters were saying to each other. This is a risky way to go about writing anything since, with the sunk cost fallacy being a real possibility, it could drain you of your creative faculties. (Download: session IV)

Retaining the option of "killing" a project as need be – consumed by occasionally trivial fears

Surrender

The last few paragraphs are what speak truly and openly of my defeat: the sentences are too long, the choice of words defer to a subconscious lack of precision, the uneven amount of attention paid to different parts of the same setting hint at the absence of decisiveness. Game over. (Download: session V)

Sunk costs – fractional kill – diminishing returns

--

Fog index: 16.72

The Voice

There are many different kinds of voices. Some you can hear, some you can't, some that seem to boom into your cavernous head from all sides, some that seem to sprout from the centre, some that come and go as they wish, some that you bump headlong into like an innocuous but ubiquitous lamppost. Then, there are those voices that are not inside your head at all, but at the other end of the phone call you're attending to right now.

These voices have bodies, I'm given to believe, something to which a head is affixed to, and through the head, words are spoken. For the record, I don't like spoken words. One moment they're there, the next moment they're gone. I hate that kind of indecisiveness - unless of course they're forced into a small box called a "voice recorder" or if they're carved into stone by a manic engraver. The voice in my earpiece is now telling me about what a bad morning it had.

[caption id="" align="alignright" width="300" caption="Early morning... blues?"][/caption]

How do voices have bad mornings? Are they blown out into the world through a snot-smeared windpipe? Or do they bear messages as murky as the mind that conceived them? Actually, the voice in my ear seemed to be suffering both maladies: expletives four to fourteen letters long were clamoring for an audience with blatant disregard for the Doppler effect, and the immutable moss-green of the phlegm I could almost hear.

Whether voices can have bad mornings or not, I can. I was having one then and there. First call I get in the morning is from a "friend" complaining about how her HDD crashed and how I could be responsible for it. I was stupefied when I heard that, and when she went on to inform me that the catastrophe befell her after I forwarded an email from Reuters, I snorted. That was the signal, I'm thinking, for the barrage of mucosal sludge.

Even so, I don't like being looked down upon or frowned upon for hitting out at a messenger who's brought me bad news. That is unfair, to expect a receiver to receive all kinds of glop and remain silent. Come to think of it, that'd be the psychopathic silently-thinking cold-bloodedly-conspiring contemplatively thumb-twiddling Mephistopheles down the hall. An honest man should be allowed to lash out, to have it over with. The mistake lies with the dolt who set the messenger on his journey. He didn't sponsor any armour.

What can you do against voices? What can you do against something that seems to come from a head far, far away? You can shout back, sure, but that's head versus head. Can you trap voices in small black boxes? I don't think so. What's going to be in the box when you reopen it later is a rant without beginning or end, eviscerated neatly out of a morning it had sought to destroy but now, doing nothing to the evening.

How do you knock the serrated stiletto out of a voice that's waiting to stab you in the back?

The Death Of A Blogger

More so than using WP's Plinky to find something to write these days, I go through the archives of my oldest blog, more often than not finding not just badly written posts but also lots of good ideas that I find hidden between the lines but, back then, was digressing too much to focus on them. While I can safely say that I have matured as a writer, I know the difference between the earlier "me" and the present "me": I used to write because I felt like writing something. Now, I write because I have something to write about.

That's not a desirable part of the maturation process, nor is it undesirable.

That feeling of "wanting" to do something because you like doing it and not because it has become a medium to express something is what I miss, though not too much because I could only have written so much meaningful or contributory pieces before starting all over again. Writing for writing's sake has an expiry limit. We're all humans and our mastery over something is automatically succeeded with our employment of that same thing.

What prompted me to write this post was that, when I was sifting through some old notes on the blog, I found a particular WP user who had left comments on almost every post for a period of about four months. Whensoever I used to put up an article on anything, he had the habit of finding something wrong with it, and we would get into a lengthy discussion. I would comment on his blog, he would respond on mine, it was such a good experience, of finding a friend out of nowhere.

I found a link lying around to his blog and decided to pay him a visit, but this is what I saw.

[caption id="attachment_509" align="aligncenter" width="520" caption="Interrupted."][/caption]

One blogger has disappeared. In his place is an emptiness that cannot be filled because it is still so full of memories. Another blogger has died. In his place is a man who wants to write something only because he has something to write about and not for writing's sake. 'Ars gratia artis' is not impractical nor is it unreasonable as an expectation, but it has its purpose, a time and purpose to practice it. Being an artiste non gratis is not condemnable. What is is the idea that art is what it is and cannot be anything more.

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The Lonely Perfectionist

A few months before, I had a plot simmering in my head about a lonely perfectionist. I let it go over time for lack of interest – the way I naturally developed the storyline didn’t go well with the other half of me, the “me” that wanted to concentrate more on the reaches of insanity and what insanity itself desired.

The Lonely Perfectionist

He was a lonely man, sitting alone in his dark room for hours on end, and when he emerged, rarely though that was, he would conjure great stories about himself, his brave conquests. The lonely perfectionist was an intelligent man, and into these stories he would throw in specks of his humiliations, his defeats, just to provide the tale with a sense of balance and some plausibility, as such. One fine day, when his only son comes visiting, the lonely perfectionist wishes not to open his long shut door. When the incessant knocks becomes unbearable, he leaves his chair and pulls the door open with an inexorable irascibility.

As the hinges creak against the damp mass of wood, so also does his past. A multitude of memories flash past his eyes, each more vague than its predecessor, and the lonely perfectionist only ignores them. He deigns them as the foolish who chase after what was done. He left his wife to fend for herself on the lonely and cold streets of Kzar (a fictitious town), he left his toddler son to beg; he thought, more so than wished, that he was leaving his past to die. And now, it had raised its serpentine head once more, rearing up against his bosom. He looks up at his son, for he is tall, handsome, and rich by the merit of his garb. As the old man opens his mouth to shoo the stranger back into the darkness whence he seemed to have emerged, the son silences him with a casual wave. They only exchange a stern stare, each delving into the other’s eyes with an immense hatred.

The rich, finally, hands the poor a purse of leather, albeit leaving him to claim it from near his feet, and departs. The old man is intrigued. “What scourge from the dead is this?”, he wonders; he picks it up, pushes the door back into its termite-ridden nightmare, and gets back to his study.

The room of the lonely perfectionist is small, housing only a chair, a table and no bed. Clothes lay strewn on the floor. When he moved into Alam, he had purchased this small room and the house on the other side of the wall. He had further permitted a group of young boys to move in, and he only asked of them to feed him night and day by pushing a small plate of rice and chicken through a crack at the bottom of the wall, and some oil and wick whenever he tapped his stick thrice. He cared not for the rent, he cared not for the tantrums they seemed to throw. He was a lonely old man, and he only wished to stay that way.

Years passed, and the arrangement saw itself fit to continue unperturbed. None had seen the old man come out into the daylight. He always was inside, poring over great volumes that he had carried with him from Kzar. What evil or demise these tomes spoke of, no living soul would ever know. The truth was, they were empty with not a single sentence or line or word, not a single tale or fable or moral, not a single hero or king or kingdom. The lonely perfectionist was a creator and needed for himself only a canvas; unto a world of madness he may have been consigned, but he created legends every day.

What he always did and would continue to do for quite some time to come, however, was keep the pages of these books to his ears, and they would speak to him the epics of the past. They don’t, nor do I, know whence these books come from. In fact, they, nor I, knew not whether they were such magical books, ones written by sorcerers and necromancers past. All he would do is sit and listen to them, and whenever he completed a book, he would stand up and dance for days together, stomping and pounding his careworn feet on the floorboards. He would sing, screeching and howling into the night. None knew which memory he was reliving, whose birth he was proclaiming. And then, all of a sudden, even as immediately as God’s wrath descended upon Sodom and Gomorrah, he would quieten. Not a sound would emerge until the lonely perfectionist had completed another tome, another past.

When he finally opened the purse, he discovered within it a hundred glittering coins of pure gold! Not a penny more, not a penny less, but a hundred! The old man knew not what to do with them. What a sensible man does with such treasure – thus was his thought. As he pondered, the few fragments of the past that had managed to survive, the love he was bestowed with by his wife and son from the days older than his discovery, return like the horsemen of the Apocalypse: perhaps his only son had come all this way to gift him another story!

And so, pushing away the faithful books into a pile, and the pile into a darker corner, the old man doused the lights. And then, he slowly leaned his head in toward the coins now laid strewn on the table. One by one, he pushes them to the centre, and yearns for them to begin to speak! Days pass, the morsels are neglected. The tenants are concerned, their plates have not been returned. The neighbours are angry, there is a stench emanating from the room. But the old man ignores them all, until finally, he begins to believe the coins are mute. The coins are mute! Thumping his fist angrily on the table, he begins to shout. “Speak, ye worthless!” and receives only silent humility in return.

“How can you not speak?! You even have the face some other man embossed on yours, are you not ashamed?! You have lost your identity, you have been unmasked, and you have no sorrow to put forth, no regret?! What are you?! Who beat you into this torment?! I have been magnanimous before, and I will be once more now, all for you! - so forth.

He can't stand the silence of the coins, bangs his head against the table. Finally, he is dead.

Thus passed the lonely perfectionist.

~

I know I've been working towards writing simpler over the last few months, but the story just seemed to warrant it. Like I was venerating von Goethe.

So, that’s how my story went. It was inspired by a dream I had: I was sitting in a dark room, banging my head (don’t ask me why) against a wooden table upon which was a lonely gold coin. Now, this was the problem: I knew I wanted to base the story on insanity – insanity would be my protagonist – and the old man, the antagonist. However, I kept walking into a cul de sac when I attempted to depict such madness, which also served as a clear reminder that I’m quite far from being a good writer. IMO, the good writer differs from the not-so-good writer not because he has a better imagination but because he has better ways of putting it down.

Clean Writing For... Geniuses

There are enough articles out there that tell you how to write. Today, I'm going to tell you how NOT to write, especially how NOT to write something that is bound to frustrate the shit out of the reader.

[caption id="attachment_106" align="aligncenter" width="500" caption="That definitely doesn't read right."][/caption]

We'll go through this in a series of points because I don't have the patience (for obvious reasons) to give you an introduction on bad writing, you have enough examples - and if you're around 20 years of age, you probably creating an example in an SMS message or a chat-window right now.

1. Periods (".") are important because they end sentences. They provide an invaluable break in the flow of thought in what you're writing. If you don't use this particular little dot, what you're writing looks like you've thrown it up - literally. Words don't deserve that.


2. An ellipsis is three dots in a row, one after another, without a space in between, like this: "...". That wasn't so hard, was it? Dot. Dot. Dot! It stands for either "to be continued" or "some text has been left out here because I think it's unimportant". Whenever you want to put that thought into the reader's head, you use the ellipsis. You shouldn't use it if the BOTH of us know what's coming next NOR in the middle of a sentence.


3. I'm not too particular about this one, but try capitalizing the first letters of your sentences and any names. The world's not going to end if you don't, but try it out, it could give what you're writing a classy look, like you're particular about things. I know, you're going to be put down as an intellectual dweeb for that, but when it comes to writing, things work differently.


4. I am QUITE sure none of you use Notepad or Wordpad to write these days. You either use MS WORD, that application that Mac users have or inside your browser, and I am QUITE sure that none of you still use IE6 - it's either Firefox, Chrome or that browser Mac users have. All three of them, note, have an add-on for checking the spelling of what you're putting down. In fact, they come with it when you install them. This is just to tell you that writing like that doesn't make you... "cool".


5. Stop using the word "like". Seriously. Use it only when you know what a simile is. A simile is like a metaphor.


6. Commas are beyond this world in their purpose. Please feel free to use them abundantly. You know, when you're writing to someone and you have no way of telling them when you're pausing and when you're not, a comma comes to the rescue, bold as it is. People will invoke a pause in what they're reading when they come across a comma. It's on my list of top 10 inventions of all time.


7. When you've learned how to use a period, you might be interested in the return button on the keyboard. When you press it, you get a paragraph, just like that, right out of nowhere, and a paragraph represents a more significant break in the flow of what you're reading. It's like this: you're organizing an event, and there are the lighting, sound and carpentry teams. It makes sense to have all the electricians in the lighting team and all the audio engineers in the sound team - all of them are humans like all of them are sentences, but the segregation is necessary to get the work done. It's a hard life, but it's better that way.


8. Hyphens bring words together to create hyphenation. An en-dash, which is the width of the capitalized "N", signifies a range (e.g., 6-10 horses); note: no spaces before or after. On modern keyboards, like the QWERTY and the Dvorak, the figure dash and en-dash are actuated by the same button, which is an outright tragedy, but let's move on. The em-dash is as wide as the capitalized "M" and demarcates parenthetical thought ("... I'm sure you know - like everyone else does - that you're a genius..."). It's also used to signify interruption: "So, as I was saying, you need to- BAM! Oh my god, you killed him!"

There you have it: 8 simple rules to make your writing look good, at least better than it already is. Please use them and write like a normal person - and by normal, I mean what it represented in a time as recent as 1981. I don't like the new definition.

How To Write Your Own Blockbuster Movie

Many people think writing a story requires a lot of commitment and a clear sense of the big picture. They’re right: it’s important to not get lost in what you’re writing, and it’s even more important to keep the reader’s attention – that means you’ve got to be detailed but not too detailed. If you’re going to add a twist, you shouldn’t make it too twisted unless you want the reader feeling stupid; if you’re going to keep things simple and light, you shouldn’t keep them too simple unless the reader thinks he’s reading about a painting by Claude Monet – then again, you can do those things once you’ve established yourself in the field and no longer care about your books selling (like Stephen King).

What I’ve noticed after reading all those story books that have sold and all those movies that have won Oscars is that there are some directives you could use offhandedly to end up with something you can sell. I’ve classified them into a series of steps that correspond to the structure of a story you might be writing, or want to write.

Step 1

Define your protagonist. There are 3 general types of heroes amongst men and 3 amongst women. For the chauvinists,

 

[caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="180" caption="The Gents"][/caption]

1. The Good – He is the epitome of all things righteous and justified; a paragon of virtue; he never shuns from a fight to defend the wronged and the incapable, and he somehow manages to make it alive and unscathed. If you’re from south India, you might know him as Rajnikant; if you’re from anywhere else, you might know him as Superman. It is unbecoming of The Good Hero to have had traumatic experiences from his past haunting him now, and any problem in his lifetime must be no more than 1 hour old. He may not know the villains or what they’re up to – but never mind, he can deal with it.


2. The Bad – Not exactly the anti-hero, but more like someone who’s been forced to become a hero amongst his people. He knows what the villains are capable of and he doesn’t exactly want to be there before it happens – otherwise, let’s face it, there won’t be a moment of I-don’t-want-to-be-a-hero-sort-of-heroism, would there? There are two classical examples from history: Bruce Wayne/Batman and Albus Dumbledore. Both of them have made lots of mistakes, are constantly uncomfortable because of the power they have, and can’t speak in their original voice no matter how jovial the talk is.


3. The Ugly – He is the most flexible of the lot simply because he, the writer and the reader all know there’s not much he could have done anyway. There may have been mistakes in his past but they’re of no consequence, and the mistakes he’s going to make he’s also going to be very sorry for, but never mind… there’s not much he could have done anyway. Very few writers have managed to make a hero out of this guy, and one of them was JRR Tolkien with Samwise Gamgee (no matter that he was a little too fag-like). The single most important silver lining is that you can dedicate a whole chapter to guys like this climbing up just one side of a mountain, and you can smoothly use the next 2 chapters to describe his journey downhill.

And now, for the ladies.

 

[caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="300" caption="The Ladies"][/caption]

 

1. The Beauty – She is the lady, a most beautiful, a most elegant, a most pain-in-the-ass-like French b***h but without the b***hyness. It won’t look good to have her bumping around tables or toppling flower vases, and it won’t look good to have her talk loose around men. Even if she’s single, you’ve got to keep her away from either sex because, God knows, she’s innocent. The advantage with this sort of a heroine is that she can be the damsel-in-distress and the one who inadvertently ends up rescuing her. Of course, if you’re a radical feminist, you might want to call her Wonder Woman.


2. The Boy – She is the quintessential anti-heroine, the one who is always pissed because of something or the other, and the other could very well have something to do with daddy issues. She will stand up and fight in the face of danger irrespective of whether she’s fighting the good guys or the bad guys – what ultimately matters is that she fought, and what matters even after that is that she won. Depending on the bend of your thoughts, you can either write a whole book about how she changes in character from The Boy to The Beauty, or you can keep her the way she is and end the story quickly.


3. The Blonde – I don’t think this needs any explaining.

So, there you go: you have a protagonist and a starting point. There’s not much to say about the settings – whether your story is based around the time Jesus died (the first time), in 60s or way ahead into the future, the general description I’ve given of the characters should hold.

Step 2

Define your antagonist. This shouldn’t be hard; to make it easy to remember them and their defining traits, I’ve used the names of well-known villains.

 

[caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="300" caption="The Mischief"][/caption]

1. Gollum/Two Face – He is not a born villain but circumstances have forced him to become one. Although not necessarily a Darth Vader(explained later), they both share many characteristics that define their behavior and, more often than not, their appearances, too. This is a villain who will not give up simply because there’s not much else to do, and he will persevere till the end or die trying. His is a breed very difficult to get rid of and he will always come in the way of things – with good timing and operatic music for good measure. The only way to get rid of them is to kill them accidentally or somehow keep them in the same room as the real villain and a bomb.


2. Lord Voldemort – These are the real pain-in-the-ass kind; you, the writer, are allowed to pack their past with as much trauma and disaster as you want to and they will still be as good (or bad) as they were before. They can be real masterminds or a bunch of jerks that got lucky – but no matter, there’s no way around them. They have to be faced sometime or the other. Another thing about them is that they usually have quirky weaknesses – and finding out about them usually entails going through another villain. The LVs are not interested in raping women or stealing your children, but only power, and more often than not, they’re gay, too.


3. Darth Vader – This type of antagonist is my favorite in every sense of the word, including a voice that beats Christian Bale’s best attempts at a baritone. They are definitely masterminds and will not kill indiscriminately (unlike the other two). Make sure you’ve defined their goals to the last intricate detail because if they’re going to get there, they’re going to get there all the way – the only things they’re willing to lose are their limbs. Another easy thing about such villains is that any past-events in their lives are of little consequence, or of none at all if you’ve taken care to present a gripping plot in the present. Last but definitely not the least, they can be persuaded to give up, but the persuasion has to be a really,really good deal. Classic example: Luca Brasi.

Step 3

Define the style of your plot. Now, the antagonists and the protagonists are going to be bounced around by the plot and you have the overwhelming liberty to play around with their lives as you see fit. The good storywriter will write a balanced story where both sides take damage, and a bad storywriter will win awards. You choose.

The good plots, first.

1. Quid Pro Quo – What the protagonist deals, he will soon receive without pause. In this case, the plot carries no distinct mood of its own by seems only to illustrate Newton’s third law. The hero hits out at the villain, the villain hits back, the heroine is in distress, the villain hits out at the hero to press his advantage, the hero retaliates, all seems to be well. Add salt to taste. However, even in this tit-for-tat mess, two variations can be discerned: damped – where the extents of multiple retaliations gradually decrease – and accelerated – wherein the magnitudes of the retaliations increase until they hit a final crescendo.


2. Chums Of Chance – Here, the majority of the twists and turns are dictated by chance occurrences. The author can do so as he wishes and run a zigging and zagging line of thought from start to finish, at all points keeping the reader glued to the script. On the downside, this plot-style presents two dangers: the first is, you could end up writing a book like HHGG – which are good as books or as a topic of discussion but not so much as movies; the second is, if you try to go the other way, you could end up with something Dickensian.


3. The Ringmaster – All you need to do to execute this style of plotting to the T is describe very little of very little: all you need to do is take a very small section of the story that’s in your mind and describe it to great lengths, and then write the following chunk as if you don’t give a damn how it’s interpreted. Repeat. Also, make sure your characters are dull and/or dim-witted and that the damsel is at the other extreme. Good examples include many of Hitchcock’s and Kubrick’s movies and, interestingly, the third law of thermodynamics.

The bad plots, next.

 

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1. Fat Man On A Seesaw – The hero keeps screwing around, the villain keeps sucking it up, the heroine keeps getting impressed. There’s nothing more to say on this subject except that this style died out when Sylvia Plath and Virginia Woolf were born.


2. The Juvenile Payback – When you’re writing something for the silver screen, you have the monumental liberty to simply ignore a logical inconsistency or two: as more and more action gets packed into the script, it becomes hard for the viewer to pause and ponder on what just happened. However, don’t take this too far, you might just end up with Plan 9 From Outer Space. Apart from just ignoring the inconsistencies, you can introduce a couple of your own. As for the template, use one of the better plot-styles.

Step 4

You’re all set to start writing, now, so before you do, here are some last minute tips on spicing up/dumbing down your manuscript.

1. Using philosophical standpoints from the 1920s to the 1960s could attract a large crowd.


2. More than two adjectives per verb means you could write this as a musical, too, and since so many adjectives rhyme, you can postpone retirement by a few weeks.


3. Allowing any two characters to get very, very intimate would mean you’re after wanting to explore sexual tensions as well. Beware, this is scorched-earth territory: once you go in, it’s very hard to come out. However, there are a few ways out, for example having the couple talk about the bigger picture of the plot with erotic analogies; e.g. Atlas Shrugged.


4. It’s good to describe the characters just as much as you describe the world around the character. Don’t spend four pages on the sky and then one on the character if you don’t have any metaphors to establish.


5. Write the script page-by-page. Use a separate set of notes to indicate the different chapters, but within each chapter, knock yourself out with the little details. If something doesn’t connect even a little bit, chuck it. If something connects just a little bit, leave it open to interpretation. If something connects a lot, use it to guide the plot.


6. For controversy’s sake, go after wars waged in the last two centuries, political assassinations and the capitalism-versus-communism charade. They always work.

Now, you’re set.