Tag Archive for 'storytelling'

Writing Egotistical Asshat Characters From Life Experience


They say you should write what you know. Well, I do.

Last year, I posted a script excerpt from the upcoming second episode of Your Face is a Saxophone. This bit of the script shows off the evolution of Andrew’s character since I wrote the first episode; an evolution which is, for the most part, a careen in the exact same direction.

There’s a very specific reason that I didn’t merely stick to Andrew’s character, but rather turned it up to 11. Shortly after the first episode of Your Face is a Saxophone debuted, my life imitated my art.

In Episode 3, Andrew will make this rant, which is I swear to god almost verbatim something that the person I’m about to tell you about said to me. I can’t make this shit up:

I met a guy — let’s call him Deuce Shmagner, because I’m not looking to call him out by his real name, tempting as it may be — who was running a small, in-person Bitcoin exchange. Continue reading ‘Writing Egotistical Asshat Characters From Life Experience’

    Non-Euclidean Character Arcs: How to Write Characters With Hyperdepth

    Tesseract rotating through the 4th dimension
    In fiction, we often hear people talking about complex characters as having “depth”, and simple characters being “one-dimensional”. I’d like to talk about what this means, because in Your Face is a Saxophone, I’m striving to make some of the characters four-dimensional.

    We all know the basics of geometry. A line is one-dimensional. A square is two-dimensional, made up of four lines connected at their endpoints. A cube is three-dimensional, made up of six squares connected at their edges. And a tesseract is four-dimensional, made up of eight cubes connected at their sides.

    Actually, you might not have heard of the last one. But take a look at the image up top: it’s a tesseract rotating through hyperspace. Whether that breaks your brain or not, the point is: there can be more than three dimensions to any given thing.

    So how does this apply to characters in fiction? Let’s have a look at some examples.
    Continue reading ‘Non-Euclidean Character Arcs: How to Write Characters With Hyperdepth’

      Mass Effect 3 as Automatic Performance Art by the Collective Unconscious

      All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players

      A large group of devoted Mass Effect fans absolutely detested the ending to the game’s third, final installment. The outrage became so frenzied that developer BioWare announced that they were going to change it. This news has led to further frenzied outrage from game developers fearing that their artistic integrity will no longer be respected, critics decrying it as the death of games-as-art, and other general quasi-enlightened indignation.

      The simple answer to all this is that video games are inherently a collaboration between author and audience. The more holistic answer is twofold:

      1. An author’s intent is meaningless if they fail to communicate it to the audience
      2. Art and meaning does not have to be intentional, and is often unintentional

      The first point is a uniquely metamodern observation: it neither rejects nor accepts the validity of authorial intent, but makes it contingent upon its relationship to the audience’s interpretation. The second point is something that has been well-established since the dadaist and surrealist movements (but obviously not widely-understood). The result is that Mass Effect is not a mere series of video games. It is performance art, being unwittingly performed both by BioWare and their fans.

      VAGUE SPOILERS FOR MASS EFFECT 3 FOLLOW
      Continue reading ‘Mass Effect 3 as Automatic Performance Art by the Collective Unconscious’

        How One Simple Cut Could Have Made Avatar’s Story Excellent and Let It Win Best Picture

        WARNING: The following post discusses key story points in Avatar. They are not “spoilers” per se, because everyone has already seen this movie (if not literally, then figuratively).

        Avatar’s story is the one thing that has elicited a near-universal “meh” from the entire world. We’ve all heard it before: hero infiltrates enemy, learns the enemy is his friend and his friends are the enemy, helps former enemy fight former friend, and said fight is a standard progression of hero almost succeeds, then he fails, but then he miraculously succeeds. Archetypes like this aren’t a bad thing; after all, we humans have been telling this same basic story for thousands of years, keeping it fresh with minor variations (i.e. Avatar’s transhuman motifs), and it’s always interesting if not particularly groundbreaking. But with all the love and attention Avatar’s visuals got over the alleged 14 years James Cameron worked on them, the script is admittedly less polished. That’s probably one of the big reasons why Avatar didn’t win Best Picture at the Academy Awards.

        There are many little things which Cameron could have done to twist the Hero’s Journey archetype — perhaps Jake Sully should have betrayed the Na’vi willingly before feeling remorse later on, for example — or simply cleaning up some of the dialogue and filling some plot holes would have sufficed. But perhaps the best thing Cameron could have done to Avatar is to make one simple removal, changing nothing else. This one removal would make Avatar’s criticisms of the War on Terror, racism, technology, and destruction of the environment immensely more powerful.

        Following the scene after Hometree’s destruction, when we see slow-motion shots of Jake and Grace being wrestled out of the avatar links, Grace shouting “you murderer!” at Parker, fade to black. Roll credits.

        Okay, that may be a “simple” cut, but it’s pretty major. Still, it would have made Avatar a much better film. Hit the jump for why:
        Continue reading ‘How One Simple Cut Could Have Made Avatar’s Story Excellent and Let It Win Best Picture’

          Realization: Hideo Kojima is Video Gaming’s Béla Tarr, Except Not Talented

          I didn't intentionally position Tarr so he was looking at Kojima all like, "You think I'm this fucking guy?" But it worked out pretty well.

          Béla Tarr is the director of cult classic Hungarian films such as Sátántangó. Hideo Kojima is the designer of massively popular Japanese video games such as Metal Gear Solid 4. These two men actually have quite a lot in common, save for the medium they work in, their popularity, and their pretentiousness when discussing their craft.

          Let me describe Sátántangó to you, briefly. The opening consists of an eight minute shot of the camera doing almost nothing while watching a bunch of cows:
          Continue reading ‘Realization: Hideo Kojima is Video Gaming’s Béla Tarr, Except Not Talented’