HOW NOT TO WRITE: Pooka!

Human-sized furry creature sitting at a diner table.

Answer me one question. Are these the shadows of the things that Will be, or are they shadows of things that may be, only?

In the third installment of Blumhouse’s monthly horror movie installments on Hulu, Pooka! is the story of a struggling actor who gets a little too into his part as the titular Pooka, and begins to spiral, as he loses track of who he is outside of Pooka.

This definitely isn’t the worst horror movie I’ve ever seen, and therein lies the problem. I felt like this one had more potential, but it does need more work. Problematically, I’m more on the narrative side, and I wouldn’t know how to balance the cinematography and other elements that were good with editing the script as a whole.  

Pooka! has its optimum potential as a story about an abuser realizing the logical outcome of his behavior, but as a coherent film, it is hindered by several major issues: 1) It is trying too hard to hide the reveal with confusion despite having given it away, and 2) it is trying to do and be so many things that the abuser angle becomes a secondary note to the wackiness.  It’s about commercialism, but also a bad father/husband who ended up killing his wife and child. It’s an homage to both A Christmas Carol and “An Occurrence on Owl Creek Bridge.”

Below, are tons of spoilers, but since this has been out for a year, we’ll deal with it.

HOW NOT TO WRITE: Falling INN Love

Gilbert the Goat

Falling INN Love. Get it? There’s an INN, and the protagonists are falling IN love while they fix up the INN. It’s an INN they’re falling IN love IN. Get it?

Okay. Goofy pun aside (and apart from repeatedly explaining to my girlfriend why Gabriela should be a softball/Home Depot lesbian caught in a warring BnB plot with Charlotte and end up with Shelley), this is actually a decent movie. I had low expectations based on the title as well as Netflix’s general ridiculousness in picking up terrible romcoms and limited series that are maybe the worst written nonsense in existence.

Falling INN Love (get it?) is about Gabriella Diaz, whose life falls entirely apart in the span of a day. She loses her job due to the company collapsing, and then she realizes her boyfriend has no intention of committing to her at all (doesn’t hurt that he’s also bossy and annoying). So she enters a contest to win an inn in New Zealand. She wins! And she goes to New Zealand to check it out. Apparently, it needs a lot of work, and she’s as stubborn as the goat that lives on the property, so she decides to stay and fix the place up to sell.

Unlike The Princess Switch and The Xmas Prince (and sequels), the male lead isn’t a vaguely symmetrical piece of cardboard. Jake is kind of cute. He has a life, as a contractor who keeps bees (I assume as a hobby?). He’s funny, not aggressive or arrogant, and while he butts heads with our protagonist Gabriella at times, he isn’t negging her on purpose. Ye gods, if I have to see one more dumbass male lead being written as “edgy” when he’s really just a dick.

Anyway, moving on, I really enjoyed the side characters. The setting of a small town in New Zealand doesn’t sound like much on the outset, but everyone is so nice, and they all have their own thing going on. Way better than the endless string of fake European countries that seem to have ten residents. I even ended up liking the Bitch character Charlotte, because she has really clear motivations, and she was never really that mean. Her goals just conflicted with our protagonist’s goals, and she made some poor choices.

Furthermore, and this part struck me, I don’t remember the last time I watched a romcom and was genuinely laughing, not AT the film, but in response to JOKES. I suppose that reveals me to be the black-hearted creature I truly am, but most romcoms in movie style are not that funny. They rely on cringe humor and half-assed “sassiness” in their characters. For Falling INN Love (get it?), the characters have their quirks, but not in a way that feels stereotypical or forced, and Gilbert? He’s the real star.

All and all, Falling INN Love (get it? Okay, I’ll stop, I swear.) is sweet, actually romantic, funny, and very rewatchable. Honestly, for improvement, I have only a few suggestions on what might make it better.

TL;DR- HOW NOT TO WRITE

Unlike most of the movies in this genre, the heroine actually has a pretty good reason to leave her home, boyfriend, and job (although technically her company collapsed). Thus, the audience is not being asked to suspend their disbelief too far on this point. At most, the stretch comes from the amount of money it would cost to renovate this house. So, plot-wise we’re only looking at certain tension and pacing improvements.

By the middle of the movie, when Gabriella and Jake are actively working on the inn and we get numerous moments of them arguing about how much of the old structure to keep vs how much modernization is needed, their chemistry and the fun of the movie really hits its stride. Unfortunately, it takes us a bit to get there, and their relationship before this point felt a bit off.

• Don’t skimp on setting up plot beats.

The only actual flaw I see in the movie itself is that from Gabriella’s first “meet cute” with Jake, she is inexplicably antagonistic with him. We don’t see her being antagonistic with her dick coworkers, or with her boyfriend. She’s actually very appeasing in nature, and it works to her benefit with the townspeople of Beachwood Downs.

It really seems as though she and Jake are at odds in this part because they are supposed to be at this part of the story. The structure of this romance doesn’t follow early heat slam-bam plot, but the romcom overcoming differences. This means that, while we probably expect them to have a problem with each other at first, it does need to be set up properly.

I would argue that the first part of the movie, during which we set up Gabriella’s character, she should be more formidable with her coworkers rather than letting them walk over her and during the fight with her boyfriend, he call her a stubborn control freak. Either he should in irritation, or her friend should in a loving way. We need some grounding for this layer of her character. Otherwise, it seems like her personality flips the minute she sees Jake.

Again, Jake is a pretty nice guy. Not a Nice Guy. He’s just helpful and only teases her a little when she knocks things over and makes a mess. We need more of a reason for her to be so combative every time she sees him, since (refreshingly) he hasn’t done anything to make her angry. He does run into her suitcase with his car, but that was as much her fault as his.  A little work in setting up their early dynamic would iron out this kink.

• Don’t forget to let the narrative breathe.

As Sherry Thomas (Author of The Lady Sherlock series, The Magnolia Sword, etc.) pointed out during her 2019 RWA panel on pacing, it really only has to be “good enough.” The opening needs to be good enough to get us to the rising action, the middle has to move us to the, and the ending has to bring things together. (I’m paraphrasing a lot. Go see her talk.) A lot of authors obsess over their openings because they know that editors are going to toss their manuscript out of the pile for arbitrary reasons and conflicting advice. So it makes sense to fret about the pacing.

Falling INN Love’s pacing is good enough. It works as a movie. However, to make this story optimal, I would have advised that Netflix invest in this project as a limited series. Unlike some of Neflix’s other limited series, Falling INN Love  has a well-established cast of characters, running jokes, a clear through-line for its main arc, as well as subplots that could be explored throughout a series of maybe 6-8 episodes. You have our main couple, a side couple with Shelley and her admirer, Charlotte’s shenanigans, the gay couple that run the café, and of course, Gilbert.

I can easily see this running for a season and being rather popular. I don’t know that they had the money, but with such a well done setting and cast, Netflix could EVEN have done one of its favorite things: Had a two season show. Except, you know, planned it from the start so people don’t attack them on Twitter.

The main reason to expand a narrative like this, even though I think the movie did a good enough job for its format, is a principle that sometimes gets overlooked in fiction: Letting the narrative breathe. If After failed becausse it is almost nothing but interstitial moments, Falling INN Love thrives because it uses them to build cause and effect style on one another until we reach our conclusion. Drawing from that strength, it could easily shift from a movie to a short series allow for that narrative breathing, that careful building of character interactions. 

Even if you aren't writing something that has a lot of connective tissue, the scenes still need to have a sense of cause and effect. Don't let things happen just because they have to happen at this point in your script/manuscript.

But that's just my take. Anyway, mostly enjoyed this one. As always, if you have suggestions something you'd like me to try to "fix" with my overly opinionated ranting, drop me a line. See you next time, cuttlefishes. 

POETRY REVIEWS: You Can't Kill Me Twice

 

Charlyne Yi: Dark haired woman with winged eyeliner
and silver fish pinning her black cloak together.

Every time I see Charlyne Yi in something, I’m always surprised and then delighted. I’m pretty sure I saw her for the first time in Knocked Up, which I didn’t particularly enjoy despite a general good job all around by the actors, but I knew her best for Ruby in Steven Universe. Then, later, she voiced the lead in Next Gen (so cute) and played Lucifer’s nerdy little sister Death/Azrael (seen above, with Death’s fishies). And that’s just the acting side of things, because she’s also a comedian (which I knew) and a composer/musician/artist/writer/director (which I did not know). And then I saw her book come up on Netgalley.

I wouldn’t call this your standard book of poems, although as a musician, Yi can wield a metaphor adeptly. I might rate the book lower, if compared side to side with some of my absolute favorite poets who have left me gasping. You Can’t Kill Me Twice (so please treat me right) isn’t just another chapbook, though. It’s a set of musings, art, and stories. And like the best of all of these, it grows deeply personal.

One thing that Yi does that I’ve not actually seen other poets really do is integrate her illustrations into the meaning of the expression on the page. Yes, you’ll see some interesting pictures here and there in Rupi Kaur and others, but they aren’t critical to the poetry. You can just read the poem and get it. “The Study of Types of Love of Friendship, Family, and Romance” lists types like “The Black Hole” and “The Projectionist” and “The Disassemblist.”

Figure with body parts spread before them, saying
"You're so facinating. How do you work?"

Just making a list without the illustrations wouldn’t give us same effect. Later in the book, in between a few lines of a short poem, Yi deploys her illustrations as well as the space of different pages to have a couple dancing and pulling each other back and forth. One of my favorites is the of image those enormous glasses the optometrist gives you, to look between lenses for which one looks right, and Yi punctuates each with a little circular lens with a drawing: Repression, Depression, and Reality. (I like the little ghost, okay.)

Apart from that, there are volumes of poetry that make me laugh, but reading this, there were a lot of little moments of saying “YES!” and outright snorting in laughter. Yi’s ability to move fluidly between roles makes for volume of poetry and art that is ever changing and doesn’t let you settle. It was a quick read, yes, but very enjoyable.  Her humor is also a moving target. Sometimes it’s a bitter laugh, and sometimes it’s about an egg going up someone’s butt.

Thematically, Yi does address romantic relationships to a degree, but this is by far not the only focus. It’s hard to pin it all down, but You Can’t Kill Me Twice addresses love, loneliness, mental illness, suicide, identity, racism, political violence and scapegoating, building society on empathy rather than aggression, and the cyclical nature of abuse.

It’s a lot, ya’ll.

At the same time, it’s nice to see books of poetry that don’t just revolve around the rise and fall of a person’s relationships. It’s there, definitely, and I appreciate the themes of needing to be a whole person without your significant other, but that isn’t the beginning and end of what you’ll see here. The book is an interesting ride.

Check out Charlyne Yi on Twitter

Charlyne Yi's Webpage

I was given a free copy in exchange for an honest review by Netgalley.

(I also wasn't going to do another poetry review so soon, but the pdf goes boom on the 19th when Yi's book goes on sale, so I had to hurry while I had the time.)

POETRY REVIEWS: Swallowtail

Image of a butterfly with a clipped wing.
Text: "Swallowtail: Poems, Brenna Twohy"

Swallowtail is a short, potent volume of poetry by Brenna Twohy, who comes out of the scene in Portland, Oregon and is finishing law school. An overall strong debut, Twohy's poetry is like a bracing, but refreshing, step into the first winter air. I wasn't expecting it, but god, does it feel good.

Twohy's spoken poetry influences are apparent in her work. The utilization of humor, the pop culture to broach difficult topics, the boldness of those topics. You can hear the lyricism and rhythm as you read through. Twohy also employs some familiar forms to slam poetry, for example, numbered lists and prompts with descending word count. This influence proves a strength for Twohy, who is capable of balancing strikig prose and meaning with the style/gimmicks employed. Furthermore, in her few shorter poems, she is able to deliver the depth of a single thought via a thought provokig extended metaphor.

Swallowtail starts strong. Rather than following the current trends, and parcelling out development in a 3-4 part "journey" (a conceit that usually leaves the front rather weak), Twohy comes out swinging with several poems about rape and abuse. One poem even calls out the complaint that there are too many poems about rape, without recognizing why this is such a common experience.

"Another Rape Poem"

You are staring out at a world on fire complaining about how ugly you think the ashes are.

By placing these poems upfront, Twohy captures our attention and signals to the reader the kind of poet she aspires to be: willing to take risks and very much having something to say. While this volume doesn't have a central theme, the content circles rather closely on relationships and violence, grief and loss, and perception of self/others' perceptions of that self. Whether by intention or by the natural organization, the volume ends with the consequences of the poems before, which include anxiety, depression, and the examination of personal failures as a result of previous emotional abuse.

"In Which I Do Not Fear Harvey Dent"

If you think I am brave, it is because you have never seenme out of costume.

Possibly, Twohy's lawyerly aspirations are what add the extra force to her poetry. Perhaps, it is just the overlap between her experience and her writerly voice. Whatever it is, Swallowtail is a strong, refreshing debut that will leave lyricism singing in your blood, the way it does when you go to a good open mic night.

Twohy's Tumblr
Twohy's Twitter
Twohy's Website


I received a free copy of this book from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

How Not to Write: After (Part Two)

They continue to be two boring white kids on a dock.

Hello, Darkness, my old friend…

Welcome back for part two of How Not to Write: After Edition. In the first post, I spoke about the problems of trying to convert fanfiction conventions into books and movies, and the problems with After’s narrative action to begin with. To this point, I’ve spoken strictly about basic narrative elements that the movie fails to achieve. Today, we’re gonna cover issues of character and theme. Gods help us.

• Don't pass red flags off as romantic rather than alarming. 

This movie is thematically confused. It doesn’t know whether it is a coming of age story, the first act of a Lifetime original, or half a horror movie before Hardin evolves enough to join Joe of Netflix’s You. It’s supposed to be a romance, but misses most of the important beats in building the relationship between the two main characters.

Substituting red flags for romance doesn’t cut it in 2019. (#sorrynotsorry) You can’t just vaguely hand wave over creepy behavior like this and then claim it’s “just fiction” so it “doesn’t matter.” It’s bad fiction. You need to have a point to a story and something behind your relationships. Hardin needs to either dial back the entitled, possessive, sociopathic dickery… OR RAMP. IT. UP.

A lot of people have spoken about how Hardin as a character is basically an assemblage of red flags glued together with toxic masculinity and spray painted with acting so bad that we question whether the British actor is faking his accent. He negs Tessa the moment he meets her, has rage problems (beating the shit out of someone who isn’t even taking to him and trashing the house), isolating her, and using her as his personal therapist. And that’s before dealing with the raw fact that he pulls a She’s All That to try to get her to fall in love with him and keeps the game going so long his friends even seem to be surprised he’s still doing it.

It doesn’t help that the guy playing Hardin, whether by choice or directing, has less emotional range than Bella Swan. He has two emotions throughout the two movie: Soggy cardboard and sulking ten-year-old. Thus, unless they replace the actor, you’re dealing with a situation in which you have to write around his utter unlikeability. I wanted to wring his neck in the first scene, I swear, and I have discovered that I am not the only one. Get out of her room. Leave her alone. Get a job.

As I mentioned in the first part, the screenwriters also cut out an entire subplot/tension, and therefore, to replace that tension, we need to change a lot of elements. We have plenty of room to actually develop character and theme, but that means the scenes need to escalate via cause and effect. Here are some options:

Lovers of the book might choose to make Hardin more of a challenge for Tessa intellectually. This would require actually writing both of the characters as smart. Rather than creating tension from Hardin when he’s a dick to her, keep the tension going back and forth as they actually engage the other one, proving each other wrong, making each other think harder. The Legally Blonde musical does this with Emmett and Elle, and it’s absolutely adorable when they go back and forth at different times in the story with “Why do you always have to be right?” (Because they are both smart and stubborn and push each other to be more.) However, this writing choice would elevate the movie to be more of what the author wanted by connecting more to the literary references that are integral to their relationship and character. With this choice, Hardin cannot be raising all of these red flags and beating the shit out of people for no reason. As is, Hardin comes off more Mr. Wickham and much less Mr. Darcy.

(Then at the end, he’s quoting Wuthering Heights, for some reason. Like, my dude, that book does not have a happy ending. There are other books. You’re nerds. Read some.)

But that’s a direction to take if you wanted to make the story actually more romantic. If it were my choice, I would probably just embrace how terrible he is. Keep the red flags we have and push it further to more current and relatable examples. Instead of the bloody sheets of the original story, have him record them having sex to win his bet. (Welcome to the Gen Z world. They don’t just text.) Have secondary characters confront the problematic way he treats her for added tension. Instead of having the bet revealed after so many boring things have wasted our lives for 2/3rds of the movie, reveal it halfway in, having built up Tessa’s relationships with Landon and Steph. Tessa has loads more chemistry with both of these characters. Tessa describes her life as changed after him. Show us how that is after she’s been with someone so emotionally abusive and unstable.

You could still have Tessa pressured to get back with the dick in the second movie. Just use the toxic elements appropriately, or don’t use them at all. There’s no point in normalizing gross behavior as romantic, and while I wouldn’t deny a fanfic writer the right to write EDGY whumpfic, when you spend about 14 million making a movie, you’re obligated to tighten up the script and make a decision on how to portray this toxic mess of a relationship. This first movie isn’t even a romance. It’s just a mess.

• Don't try to use basic interests as a character's entire personality. 

As a more minor gripe, a lot of YA books that get picked up by moviemakers don’t put in enough effort to make realistic characters. But since they don’t seem to get this: Reading in itself doesn’t pass for a personality.

Please put down the torches.

Look, here’s the difference. People who love to read have specific things they like. They don’t ONLY like the books that their teachers made them read in English class. They have favorite GENRES. If Jane Austen is their favorite author, they probably have read more than just Pride and Prejudice. Moreover, they have other interests, opinions, motivations, and conflicts. They DO THINGS. (I mean, sometimes we do.) Anyway, the issue is that the movie writers make no effort to flesh out the characters. The only reason Tessa is so likable is the actress’s effort. I don’t even know how this movie cost so much to make when they couldn’t be bothered to have give her a coherent wardrobe. She shifts from cult dresses to a orchestra concert dress, to Bohemian girl. Even Glee enhanced characterization via their wardrobe selections. Figure her out, style her, and use all the dialogue, and visual imagery to strengthen our sense of who she is.

Hardin is even worse. Apparently, he kind of reads (but clearly hasn’t gotten all the way through Pride and Prejudice), but otherwise, he has NO INTERESTS outside of Tessa. His spiritual predecessor Christian Grey played the piano and enjoyed whips. Give the lump of hairgel a hobby.

Character development. Not just for everyone else.

• Don't isolate your main couple from outside interaction.

Finally, and this will help with the former two issues: These types of stories—since they are essentially fanfics that have Pokevolved—tend to fixate almost entirely on the main couple. This works in fanfiction because your readers come to the story looking to read about how these characters they already know get together under these circumstances. It does not work as well in books and movies based off of them because you need secondary characters to forward the plot and support your characters as they grow. Male and female lead acting like the last two people on Earth doesn’t cut it.

It’s so much easier to move your lead through their journey if they have support, if they engage with the other characters. Cause and effect. Characters drive the narrative. The movie started this with Tessa and her interactions with her mother, and Tessa’s relationship with Steph is touching and entertaining. Landon’s role could have been expanded, as could Steph’s as Tessa gets used to the new world of college. However, these characters disappear entirely for large swaths of the film because After’s creators aren’t telling a coherent story. They aren’t even trying.

Supporting characters can move the action, diffuse situations, make your characters look better or worse. Whatever you want. But if you don’t have them, the world feels empty and false. Again, what works in fanfic doesn’t always work in original fiction. Sorry.

Look, I don’t know how much money this movie series will make in the long run, or if the writers will handle the second and (ugh) third better than they did the first. But they really fucked the dog on this. They made their money back, but I really think they could have done better than to become the latest of this fanfic-to-book-to-deadly-boring-movie trend.

HOW NOT TO WRITE: The House on Haunted Hill (1999)

Five people overlook a coffin filled with dry ice and tiny coffin party favors.

House on Haunted Hill (1999) is like being at a dinner party with friends, and the hosts hate each other’s guts. It’s that awkward and unpleasant, and not in an enjoyable horror movie kind of way. Part of the brilliant turn of the 21^st century horror remake offerings (and the second that year, released in October), HOHH ends up trailing the pack for a number of reasons: trying too hard to be SPOOKY-EDGY, poor characterization, overreliance on dating CGI, and shitty pacing and plot development. IT Chapter Two can get away with having a series of unfortunate events happening to its protagonists because the evil clown/spider/ancient evil is pointedly targeting each of them personally. That’s not the case with the haunted asylum. It just wants them DEAD.

Since there are so many issues with the dramaturgy of the piece, you can’t fix all of the issues with this movie just from writing, but you could do things to make it more of a guilty pleasure movie. For me, it always comes down to characterization, but it isn’t the easiest fix. Editing could’ve helped a lot with making the movie better. No editing tweak could really make this movie really great. Unlike Thirteen Ghosts or The Haunting (1999), the fear isn’t related to anything that might truly unnerve or touch you. Just… flashing images and characters the audience has no connection to running around a haunted house. Granted, there are enough twists to make it somewhat interesting post the 52 minute mark, but the movie is pretty boring before that. And the twists are basically the same as the ones in the original, apart for the third act CGI Darkness Blob.

Short Summary: A bunch of people are invited to spend the night in a haunted asylum. If they make it through the night, they get a million dollars each. Ghostly shenanigans, booga booga.

Unfortunately, along with this, we have Mr. and Mrs. Price sniping at each other over who is trying to kill who, Chris Kattan playing the Drunk Expositionist, Taye Diggs getting stereotyped by the others as the only black character, and Ali Larter as the final girl. HOHH leans too heavily on jerky jump scares and overblown musical cues and doesn’t connect enough to its setting or characters.

TL;DR—How Not to Write

Given what a cash grab this movie was, it isn’t really worth the effort to totally rewrite it, but there are a few edits that would help. I’ll throw out three.

• Don’t blow your wad.

I don’t know what it is about movies at this particular point in time, but it’s never a good idea to lay out all the twists at the beginning of a story. Your viewers/readers aren’t stupid. You can keep them guessing a bit. My suggestion would be to simply do a little more hide/reveal with the plot, allowing the viewers to think that Price is behind most everything at first before things start to ramp up. This would be a perfect addition, since in the 1959 version, you can never really tell if there was anything supernatural happening, or if it was just the couple trying to get at each other.

52 minutes in, Stephen Price rushes into the room where his imagineer is watching all the guests on monitors, and when Price turns him around, HIS ENTIRE FACE IS GONE. It’s literally a gaping hole, with blood oozing out the sides and a row of bottom teeth. THIS IS GLORIOUS, and it should be the turning point in the movie when we finally realize for certain that Price isn’t behind things.

Honestly, by having the viewer know definitively that something spooky is happening right from the beginning ruins things. Yes, we suspect that it would be ghosts because of the history of the house. But you shouldn’t know all the things right away. That kills all the tension. Letting us know that Price doesn’t know who locked down the house was a big mistake.

My edit: Instead of rolling the opening credits over random edgelord creepiness, roll it over pictures and news reports of things happening in the house. The cut to Price at his “amusement” park, where we set up the themes of misdirection. Over the background of terrorizing Lisa Loeb and James Marsters on the rollercoaster, do the conversation with his wife in the bathtub, talking about her party. Cut the scene with her just watching the show about it. Use the saved time to give the characters time to talk at the beginning of the party so we get to know them a bit before we shake things up. Hence, actually caring about them when they die and when they reach out as ghosts to get Ali Larter’s character to come to them. For the first half of the movie, keep us wondering if we’re really seeing something happening or if Price is setting it up for his amusement and to terrify the wife he hates. Then, turn it around and terrify the man with the missing face of his employee and proceed with the rest of the twists.

This is literally the fastest way to make this movie better.

• Don’t be haphazard with your exposition.

This is literally the entire purpose of Chris Kattan’s characters Pritchard, and all he does is drink and blurt out nonsensical bits and pieces, like “THE HOUSE IS ALIVE” and “IT’S THE DARKNESS.” What darkness? “THE DARKNESS! THE DARKNESS IN THIS HOUSE!” Okay, thanks for that.

In the end, it looks like the darkness is essentially a CGI blob of ghosts trapped in the house. Pritchard’s rantings don’t help us understand this, if you haven’t encountered this concept before. It would be better to lay out the exposition in pieces. Why would Pritchard even know about the Darkness? He could know part of it, about the fire, the people who died. That’s enough for one character to know. Let the protagonists find the rest. One of the characters is a journalist after all. Make them work!

There’s also a scene earlier on that would’ve been perfect for the Blake Snyder technique “Pope in the Pool,” as I mentioned before. The idea is essentially that something wild is happening in the background (killer rollercoaster), and meanwhile, you drop exposition on the viewer. But they don’t do that. Price has a fairly bland phone call with his wife while this is happening. Missed opportunity. They could’ve laid some groundwork here for Kattan’s character to build on.

Balancing exposition (meant to pique our interest) and action (to keep our hearts racing) would do this movie a lot of good.

• Don’t treat your setting as a cardboard backdrop.

HOHH completely fails to use its setting in a significant way. That’s disappointing because people really enjoy the asylum as a site of terror, largely because asylums were places where people were terrorized. Experimented on, electrocuted “for their own good,” and the like. And nothing was done about it for a long time. That welling rage on the part of the undead would be perfect as motivation for the spirits in the house.

(If Ryan Murphy does a better job of this in the Asylum season of American Horror Story, you are failing. Murph is a mess.)

Eventually, after things get really going, you have some flashes of the evil asylum staff, but it isn’t as connected to the plot as it ought to be. The setting really feels incidental, in spite of the magical crazy room or ghosts wandering around with surgical saws. It could’ve been any house that happens to have a locking mechanism and former inhabitants that tortured each other. (The original had someone throw their spouse in a pit of acid.) A lot of stories center on an evil house. If you’re going to go with the evil house trope, you need to make the setting a character in itself, and I would argue, there just isn’t enough menace because the true horror of what happened isn’t ever fully realized.

It would be best to either LEAN IN to the asylum setting or set it in some other house and focus on the back and forth between the feuding spouses.

The House on Haunted Hill has a lot of work to do. It’s somewhat acceptable to be a bad horror movie, but less acceptable to be flat out boring. The most engaging part of this movie is honestly Famke Janssen chewing the scenery. Maybe I’m asking too much of them, but they did make money off of this. They could put in the effort to make it genuinely scary.

How Not to Write: AFTER (Part One)

Tessa McProtagonist and Dime-Store Christian Grey sit on a dock looking bored.

I’m going to get in trouble for this one, but I got a request, so I’m not about to turn down a challenge.

To be clear, I’m only looking at what happened with the movie, not the book or the fanfic.  I won’t ever pull apart a fanfic publically, and I would do a book, but 1) I wouldn’t be reading After of my own volition, so I’m not the audience for that book, and 2) A big issue with a book adaptation is getting a broad enough audience to do okay in the box office, so you also need nerds who haven’t read the books to go see it. However, since I’m interested in writing, I’ll mention a bit about the way structure would play out with regard to how readers may respond to these techniques.

In brief, After is about a girl named Tessa who goes off to college and (spoilers) meets a British guy (Hardin) who makes a bet that he can get her to fall in love with him. In the book version, the bet is between Hardin and his friend Zed over who can bang her first, and in the fanfiction Real Person Fiction, the bet is between Harry and Zane from some boy band. Maybe you’ve heard of them.

So right off the bat, the movie has eliminated a major plot tension in which Tessa is being pursued by two different guys. That in itself is fine, since apparently there will be a second love interest in the sequel. But Zed has no personality in the movie anyway (much like most of the characters in the movie). But as a result of nixing that plot is a very bland “pursuing” of Tessa, punctuated by red flags and a few flavorless hints that they’re doing sexy things.

The problem with adapting movies out of fanfiction turned books is simply this: You can’t swing a lot of fanfiction staples on the big screen. You can’t get the heat to the same level of the book without sentencing yourself to an NC-17. You can’t have your “bad boy” be as dangerous as he is on the page because the producers are looking for a broader audience. You can’t hook new viewers into the story with sloppy story structure and weak characterization (which I’ll explain in more detail below).

I’m not saying you can’t do a movie based off of books that were based off of fanfic. People do it all the time… However, these movies are largely just bad, in writing, tone, characterization, and tension. I can’t imagine that they’re really pleasing that many people. Maybe the hardcore fans, but if they gutted one of my favorite slash fics to make it palatable to a larger audience, I’d be disappointed! Movie producers and screenwriters need to work harder to actually adapt the material and realize the risks of trying to grab that broader audience while pleasing core fans.

TL;DR—How Not to Write

In this part, I’ll issues of cover structure, pacing, and narrative tension. In the second part, I’ll deal with more specific problems of character development and thematic resonance. On with the tips:

• Don’t use fanfic structure in lieu of movie/book structure.

Fanfiction is a particular genre unto itself, which is something that visual mediums just do not seem to understand. It works because your audience knows these characters already. Even in RPF, even in AU fanfic, fandom has an assumption of who these characters are. Story structure can be tight, loose, or non-existent. The fans are here for the interstitial moments, those in betweens, the extended character connection.

None of which you can actually have in an independent movie (and usually not book, but it depends) without first establishing characters and creating empathy for characters. If, in a book, you have a blank slate of a character (say, Bella Swan), at every point, the reader is still privy to the character’s thoughts, ad this affords them enough intimacy with that character to buy into their story. In the book version of After, the audience does know Tessa’s thoughts. They are aware of her thirst! In the movie, we get a single line of voice over at the beginning (ripping off Twilight, honestly), and the rest is blank stares. It’s completely bewildering that from the events on the screen Tessa would go anywhere willingly with Hardin. That means that the writing and styling of every scene absolutely must create these characters from scratch (via dialogue, action, and dress) and build the sense of tension and cause and effect if the movie is to work as a narrative.

After as a movie is extremely tedious because there is very little happening apart from Tessa and Hardin just wandering around and being lovebirds. Combined with removing the Zane/Zed factor, all these passive scenes result in just not enough happening until 30 minutes until the end.

You have to tailor your structure to the medium you’re working with and be deliberate about the choices you’re making. If After is going to pare down the main plot of the book and fanfic, and cut the narration from Tessa, they have to be prepared to shore up the movie with more action.

• Don’t rely too heavily on passive action.

Piggybacking on the previous tip, After has a problem with too little of everything. The movie relies almost entirely passive action (scenes that DON’T increase tension or forward conflict or risk) and not enough dramatic action (scenes that deliver tension, conflict, uncertainty, etc.)

Example: Habitual actions from characters tend to be passive. Tessa and Hardin swim. They cuddle. They take a bath. They walk somewhere. They talk about feelings. They dance. These are passive action scenes.

Hardin arguing with Tessa in class or pushing boundaries, the fight with Tessa’s mom, and the bet being revealed. These are dramatic action scenes.

Problematically, taking everything out to make it palatable means there’s nothing left. The screenwriters need to infuse more dramatic action into this movie. I would suggest: 1) delaying payoff in Tessa’s will-they-won’t-they, and having Hardin have to work harder to get with her, 2) introducing Tessa’s internship earlier to give her something to work for, and 3) having her mother involved in her life more regularly (phone calls or doing laundry at home). The latter would keep more tension going because Tessa would always actively be hiding something from her mom, making those conversation rife with tension because there’s a risk if her mother finds out.

That’s it for now. Check back in later for the second part of How Not to Write: After for discussion of characterization and theme.

How Not to Write: Thirteen Ghosts

Several Pissed off Ghosts Reaching for You

At the turn of the millennium, moviemakers had a thirst that could only be quenched by remakes of 60ish horror movies. The House on Haunted Hill gave it a shot, with a decent cast and questionable pacing (and a truly heinous sequel), but Thirteen Ghosts had so much potential that its flaws ended up so much more disappointing.

Essentially, this movie, and the 1960 original, is about a house full of ghosts, and the family that inherits it from the father’s eccentric uncle. The 2001 version adds a psychic, PETA for ghosts, and a few plot twists. Interestingly, the remake begins some interesting world-building and smartly uses the house as a villainous character, perhaps more so than the actual antagonist or the ghosts themselves. However, with twelve ghosts, the psychic (Dennis), the father (Arthur), the nanny (Maggie) and his two children, and Kalina the Ghost Activist, there is no time to reveal all of the backstory and lore planned for the film, let alone develop full character arcs for the father or his children.

Furthermore, the movie is so determined to have its “twists” that there are a couple of logical problems that are never resolved. While Thirteen Ghosts is a cult favorite and very entertaining and rewatchable for what it is, with some edits, this movie could be elevated to a staple of the horror genre rather than just a guilty pleasure flick.

TL;DR—How Not to Write

Although I doubt that anyone is going to remake this movie again, even with every franchise ever being remade, I think there are some improvements to the writing that would really make this story shine. Ideally, the format would change from a 91 minute movie to a 13 episode limited series on a streaming television show, not unlike The Haunting of Hill House. There are so many ghosts, and so much backstory, that unfolding the tale over a single season would allow for a stronger, scarier, and more satisfying story.

In some order, here are my recommendations:

•    Don’t center static characters.

Problematically, Dennis is the only dynamic character in this story. And he isn’t even supposed to be the lead. This happened because his is the only character we have clear goals and motivation for and because his character is introduced first and thus can be identified with first. His beginning (working with Cyrus and trapping the ghosts for money), his motivation (crippled by his power and feeling like an outcast), his middle (helping Arthur on the promise of getting the money he’s owed), and ending (sacrificing himself so Arthur can live to save his kids)—We know Dennis.

Arthur meanwhile is pretty one note as a protagonist, despite ostensibly being the lead. Even if we kept 13G in movie format, there would need to be some change for the main character from beginning to end. Arthur has no real motivation in this movie other than needing money, and then later, wanting to save his kids. We’re missing that crucial element of how this incident changes him and them. In the movie, he is grieving, but it seems like it’s been years— not six months— since his house burned down and he lost his wife. However, since his wife dying is what prompted the change in him and their circumstances, it would be reasonable for Arthur to begin the story as more emotionally shut off and distant from his kids. This would make the closure of the ending, as they survive, get closer, and see the spirit of his wife again, much more emotionally impactful.

We need both of these men to be dynamic and fully interacting with the other characters, and if the kids, Maggie, and Kalina are going to be centered in any way, they need to have worthwhile character arcs.

•  Don’t treat your audience as stupid.

Thirteen Ghosts repeats the rules of the story multiple times from various characters. This isn’t necessary. Lay the pipe you go and make it possible for the audience to figure points out themselves. There are so many details, but having a character run in with a book to tell you things you is lazy and inefficient. If there is to be any element of mystery, your main characters should be figuring things out as the audience does. If people don’t get it, and you need to repeat it, you didn’t show it well enough.

•  Don’t Treat Twists as a Substitute for Good Plotting

Thirteen Ghosts really loves its twists, but with a little thought, the logical problems created by these twists shouldn’t really exist. Maggie is the nanny who doesn’t clean or cook, but apparently looks after the younger brother (badly). Since the family is having trouble with bills, it doesn’t make any sense how they’d justify paying for her when the older sister Kathy could look after her brother. Secondly, Kalina has a complete and abrupt character turn in the final act that means, upon rewatching, her behavior doesn’t foreshadow properly or line up with her final character actions. Moreover, the family never finds out that she betrayed them or that she died, so what did it matter in the long run?

Basically, the creators of 13G wanted Maggie to be their sassy black character, and they needed a traitor to facilitate other plot elements, even if it meant her character makes no damn sense. A simple flip would solve this and allow 13G to keep its major twists intact. My suggestion would be to make Kalina the black character (May I suggest Aleyse Shannon?), keep her focused on her purpose, her smarts, and her rage. Give her motivation for her activism. Have her fight with Dennis over what he’s been doing. But then, the nanny, Maggie, can be the white woman who betrays them and was working with Cyrus all along.

It would make more sense if a despondent Arthur didn’t look too closely when his uncle sent a clever, Latin reading grad student to be their nanny for cheap. It would answer why she doesn’t look after the children much, and she could still “find” letters in Cyrus’s study to encourage Arthur to sacrifice himself. Finally, it would give Maggie’s character a purpose to even be there.

A betrayal from Maggie would mean so much more than a betrayal from a character the family doesn’t even know. A last minute save from a smart Kalina would do more service to her character than it ever did for Maggie, who apparently just touches some knobs at random and wrecks the infernal machine.

Ideally, I’d also like for this version of Kalina to team up with Dennis’s spirit to finish dispersing the spirits that escaped from the house at the end. Ideally, I would take the time to introduce each ghost with pieces of their backstory as the drama with the family, Dennis, and Kalina unfolds and each character gets their due. But the bullets above are a few quick fixes that would help the next version of Thirteen Ghosts tap into that deep place horror can go: A mix between human drama and fear that creeps under your skin.

If you have movies or shows you'd like for me to try to dissect and correct, leave me a comment and I'll see what I can do. (Not everythig can be fixed.)

HOW NOT TO WRITE: The I-Land

How Not to Write: The I-Land

The I-Land has a number of problems: Lazy dialogue, stiff acting, bizarre pacing, shoddy world-building. A lot of it could be overlooked, if the show had made better effort at characterization, but there are so many characters and so little time devoted to them, that the show is totally unable to save itself. Neither Yosemite Republican Warden nor Woke!Twist Ending can rise to make this watchable.

Below I’ll make a short overall critique/summary, and at the end (if you want to skip ahead), I’ll give some writing advice that would help improve The I-Land.

What The Fresh Hell

We open as our dark-haired lead wakes up on the beach with a conch shell. Don’t worry too much about that shell, because it will never really impact the narrative, since the characters never read the words printed on it. It’s just a pretentious literary reference to Lord of the Flies. The woman runs into a Red-headed woman, who immediately hates her and holds a knife on her, Dark Hair disarms Red Hair, and it becomes clear that they and the other ten randos wandering around on the beach all have amnesia.

The pacing, as I mentioned, somehow manages to be too fast and too slow. Because the characters come to the island as blank slates, there’s a real need to spend some time nailing down their characters before things happen. Instead, they wake up, sit in a circle, and have some really repetitive arguments before going off to search. Or some of them do. Some of them sit their asses on the beach and go swimming. So now, we’re Survivor.

For some characters, you don’t get any development them until right before they die. I’m pretty sure Moses’s only personality trait is being hungry which makes fuckall sense when you finally get his backstory. Taylor is lazy and sullen. Brody is rapey. K.C.’s only trait is hating other women (which also makes no sense with her backstory but wuteva).

So the beginning manages to be boring, and then graduates to confusing as things start happening rapid fire: Shark attack! Rape attack! MATH!!!

By the time we hit the second episode, another woman is assaulted, and I still can’t remember all of their names. Which is what happens when you have 12 main characters and do no work to earn your scenes. The dialogue lampshades this, having our lead Dark Hair (aka Chase), refer to Brody and K.C. as Rapist Guy and Red-headed Chick. Because at this point, that’s really all they are at this point (and through most of the series).

Another major way this show fails in characterization is how all of the characters IMMEDIATELY hate the lead, for no reason, and don’t act the way normal people would. They get mad at her for finding things on the island, but don’t seem curious or motivated to explore and secure their location. It is utterly ridiculous to suggest the lead is unique just for being curious about her surroundings and wanting to know what’s going on. It’s also weird that they don’t know her from Adam, but every time she suggests they try to do something, they are suspicious of her. By the time they have a real reason to be mad at her, it has no impact at all. Why would anyone trust these people?

Later on, it seems as though the writers ended up making this choice because apparently, they are all criminals (which I called by the end of the first ep, fine… I was hoping it was a reality TV thing, but okay), and so apparently, criminals don’t have any survival skills or brains and are inherently bitchy to each other, even when they have no memory of who they are. They don’t make the effort to explore until another pair of people on the island basically tell them that there’s a village to find. It’s especially jarring, since one of the main themes is redemption, but since the vast majority are, even without their memories, lazy, mean, and prone to violence, uh, I can’t imagine anyone walking away from these mixed messages as anything confused.

Then, because pacing is a myth and there is no god, they manage to blow their wad in the third episode, in which the tell us over and over what’s happening, as though it’s so complicated (it isn’t), effectively killing any tension. When Chase gets back to the island, you wonder if she can get them to believe her when they hate her… but of course, some people show up and end up explaining the thing that she’d been trying to convince them of. I mean, who needs narrative tension, amirite?

The group hated Chase and continues to hate Chase. At this point, everyone is running around while they’re getting their memories back. Great plan. We move from a mystery about what’s going on the island to a bunch of people wandering and having hallucinations specifically about their crimes. If they’d done this gradually, I might say it was a bit clever, but since we haven’t had time to get to know them outside of this, it’s hard to really be that invested as their (three day) illusions of who they are shatter, and K.C. gets a mini-Lifetime Movie for her backstory just dropped down as looooong as it can be among everyone else’s flickers of memory.

Most of these memory reveals don’t make things slide into place in that good way when you’ve been trying to figure a story out. It doesn’t build the characters, either, in the way OITNB does with flashbacks. The rest unfolds in similar fashion… boring, nonsensical, and unsympathetic. Chase starts to grow on you, if only because everyone is such a dick to her, and SPOILERS:

She’s actually innocent. (Which apparently makes all the difference in someone’s character, as ppl who break the law are all inherently bad.) I think that if they’d focused their narrative on her and Cooper, who turns out to be her husband, then they could’ve made this work, but instead it’s a huge mess with a lot of horrible people who have no reason to be so horrible because they don’t remember why they were horrible.

If this was meant to allude to Survivor or Lord of the Flies: It fails. You have to give groups logical reasons to form over time. They can’t just be psycho from the beginning and pick allegiances at random. Having a conch shell doesn’t do it.

If this was attempting to capture the mystery of Lost: It fails. It doesn’t work just because you introduced some random codes, that you later explain don’t really make sense. And the number 39 wasn’t that clever, man, even if you did more than just introduce it and then forget about it until the final episode.

If the deaths are supposed to move us: They don’t. I can’t care about characters who I don’t know, or who have no personality traits. The only one that really bothers me is Taylor because it is just so CRUEL and undeserved.

If the twist ending was meant to be shocking and poignant: It isn’t. It wasn’t earned, and a moral out of nowhere that makes no sense with anyone’s motivations isn’t going to shake us to our core about climate change.

TL;DR—How Not to Write

So, yeah. The I-Land is pretty godawful. But as a concept, it isn’t irredeemable. Even with a shoestring budget and a limited run, some better writing choices could have saved this and made it popular. Maybe people might even want more than the limited series, as it was in The Haunting of Hill House.

In some order, with the most important piece of advice last, here are my recommendations:

• Don’t ignore pacing. You have to establish a status quo and characterization before you disrupt it. Since the narrative begins with a big disruption, you need to let things settle to let us get comfortable and find attach to the characters before you start pulling out rapists, sharks, and secret messages. It’s like shampooing your hair—Settle, disrupt, and repeat.

• Don’t grind your narrative to a complete half to explain things or drop in backstory. Honestly. You can earn an infodump after some time has passed, but not multiple ones, and not as often as this show does. The 39 steps thing isn’t nearly as clever as they think, nor is the “find your way back,” and therefore there was no need to just sledgehammer the point home by having characters draw attention to it.

• Don’t disperse your viewer/reader’s attention with too many characters in focus. Learn which characters are leads and which are supporting. When you have a limited amount of time, even if you are truly masterful as a writer, it is incredibly difficult to juggle a large number of characters. Dialogue, development… It can’t be done quickly, and the more characters you have, the more time you have to devote to balancing the reader’s/viewer’s feelings. Problematically, a lot of ensemble cast work doesn’t seem to get this. Glee never did, and its tone was all over the fucking map. Arrow is grimdark all the time. Walking Dead used to, but failed in general to manage the size of its cast compared to ongoing tragedy, so can we keep caring if one guy has plot armor and people come and go underdeveloped?

• But most importantly, and building on the previous point, DON’T try to make your characters wholly unlikable or perfect. People will read, watch, and stand almost anything if they’re really hooked into those characters. I know people who stayed in fandoms for years beyond the subject material failing them because they were so invested in the characters. However, you can have characters who are pretty much a dumpsterfire mess, and have them be very popular. We have Bojack Horseman, we have Jessica Jones, we have Lucifer Morningstar (angelwing dumpsterfire)…. House, Rick Sanchez, Snape… Seriously. You can have flawed leads, but you need to make them engaging and relatable.

Get that kind of investment for the characters early on, and you can actually cover up for some errors. Pacing only has to be good enough to get us through the main plot points. Logic only has to be good enough to withstand the moment it has onscreen. I’m not saying to make your story a drunken disaster on purpose, but focus on characterization first, and then let that guide your plot, and a number of ills will ease, I swear. It wouldn’t make The I-Land perfect, but you could make it more watchable.

But Netflix still shouldn’t have spent money on this.

Midnight Voss: Writer, Reader, Teacher, Professional Malcontent

I have been writing stories since I was eight years old. More recently, my resume has expanded. Find out what I can do for you...       

I've been teaching writing since 2004, in argumentation classes, literature classes, and one-on-one writing consultations at every stage of the writing process. For several years, I have worked successfully as a ghostwriter of twelve novels (under nondisclosure), and I have begun teaching online workshops for chapters of the Romance Writers Association. Together, Ivy Quinn and I co-authored a dragon-shifter urban fantasy, Frozen Ashes and Smoldering Shards, which appeared in the USA Today Bestselling Sirens and Scales boxset. 

On this page, you can find lists of my services, testimonials from writers I have worked with, reviews and blogposts, links to my class schedule for the upcoming year, and announcement for upcoming projects.