Congratulations to Dries Coomans for taking top honors in this spring’s Cyberspace Open. His piece bent the rules a smidge, but was a powerful bit of writing. Personally I preferred the second-place entry by Lisa Scott, but it was a tough call.
With luck maybe we’ll be seeing those names again, on the big screen!
Let’s say it’s 1890 or so (plenty of wiggle room). You’re a young man from a wealthy family, but you’ve been disowned. Good schools, but since then you’ve run with a pretty coarse crowd. Now you are under extreme duress at the hands of some guy who is totally beneath you.
“You ______!” you cry out in anger and frustration. If there were ladies present they would drop their porcelain teacups and faint dead away. Men would take umbrage, while servants scurried about hoping not to be noticed.
Please help me fill in the blank. If there’s a particularly choice word from an earlier time, that’s fine, too. 1900 is about the latest, but even as early as 1700 would be cool.
Thanks!
I was wondering whatever happened in the Cyberspace Open – the organizers seemed happy to find any excuse to email contestants earlier but I hadn’t heard anything in a while. I went over to check things out and found that the finalists have been selected, but so far no mention of the YouTube voting for the big winner.
You can read the top three here, if you want to see what a winning entry looks like. The prompt for this round was to write a scene in which one character has been betrayed by a confidant, and confronts the betrayer.
A hearty congratulations is in order for all three. They made something that sparkled and shone in the eyes of their peers. Not bad for a day’s work.
I considered whether to put my own thoughts on the top three here, but the contest is still going, and I don’t want to come off as a sour-grapes kind of guy, picking at the flaws of writers who scored better than I did in the previous round. I’ll just say that I think one of these scripts is substantially better than the other two, while another had nice moments but seemed fundamentally flawed.
It was a good exercise for me to read them, because there were several places where I could tell that the writer was not getting everything out of their head and onto the page (writing time was very limited, after all). In the future I will try to identify those places in my own writing, before I leave my audience flat.
Edited to add:
If this page is any indication, they have decided to go back to the old format (a ninety-minute period for the finalists to craft a third scene) for the next iteration of the contest. (In fact, that is the same page as last year, just with the dates changed.) This is either to make the contest work better in conjunction with the Screenwriting Expo or it’s an indication that the current format isn’t working out. Or maybe both.
I hope they get the kinks worked out — it’s a cool contest (despite my frustrations). As you will see in the comments, I wasn’t the only one wondering what was going on over there.
Let’s say you’re part of a bunch of immortals who have been around since ancient times. Let’s further posit that you feed on people and are better than normal humans by any physical measure.
There was a time when there were only a few of you — the First Ones — and wherever you were at the time, you gave your species a name in the local language. That name would translate to “super-humans” or “immortals” or “silent killers in the night” or something like that. Something badass.
Unfortunately, time has passed, as it tends to do, and language has changed with it. That badass name doesn’t mean quite what it used to, either phonetically (I spent the last half-hour looking up the phonetic match for “douche” in Sanskrit and Sumerian but didn’t find anything useful), or perhaps the actual meaning has changed into something entirely different, the way “lesbian” has.
Any thoughts or ideas are welcome!
The best advice I can give to aspiring filmmakers is get a good opening and a good ending and get them as close together as possible.
— Steve Sabol, President of NFL Films
All storytellers should take this to heart, especially long-winded ones like me. The story I’m working on right needs to be tight.
I drove off the campus of Kansas University at about noon, playing my new Boxcar Satan CD louder than is strictly necessary. I went south on Highway 59 for a few miles until it crossed 56, which seemed to be going more or less my direction. It was an older stretch of road, more inclined to roll with the terrain rather than blast through it. Around Baldwin City I stopped and applied sunscreen (only a little too late) and carried on, enjoying the rolling hills and the barns. There are a lot of barns on that road; large and small, stone and wood and brick, red and white, ramshackle and tidy.
Traffic was light, polite and scrupulously obeyed the speed limits. I’m on the Santa Fe trail, which appeals to me, because Santa Fe is my next stop.
Jim Gunn asked me if I’d learned enough at the workshop. I said I’d learned all I could, but we’d have to see if that was enough. My brain is like a glass, I said, and knowledge is beer. Right now the foam is up to the rim; once it settles we’ll see how much beer is actually in there.
While saying goodbye, several of my fellow writers said (more or less) “You have to finish your novel! I have friends that will love it!” That’s encouraging, and flattering, but now I have to write the damn thing. These other good folk have constructed in their heads what the story will be like, and they like the image. But can I live up to those expectations? I don’t have a single chapter in final form yet.
I guess time will tell. All I can do is string the words together while wearing a quirk of a smile on my face, and hope the funny comes through in the darkness. For there will be darkness.
OK, at the end of my last episode I said we’d be returning to more interesting sports. I, um… lied. I’m going to talk a little bit more about boring sports, and about how with skilled writing they can sometimes even seem interesting.
Let’s start with the NBA. God what a tedious business. I call it five-on-five pro wrestling. The players have so completely eclipsed the game they play that much more is written about their behavior than about their performance on the court. Not that that takes much. Ten men jog down the court. One of them scores a basket. If he scores with enough style points, the crowd cheers. Then the ten men jog to the other end of the court. Repeat.
I could easily forget that the NBA exists at all except for the extremely entertaining writing of Bill Simmons over on ESPN.com. Unlike so-called sports journalists, Simmons makes no pretense of being unbiased. He is a fan, and his writing is about what it means to be a fan, how it can lead to great heights and even greater despair. He lives and dies by his team and it is his experience as a fan, rather than the game itself, that is compelling. His long discussions about the most painful ways to lose are awesome. So, while I have no desire to actually watch a pro basketball game, I do enjoy Simmons’ columns, and when he talks about the gut-punch feeling of a fan when their team blows its most important game in decades, I feel it too.
Then there’s tennis. Tennis can be exciting, though with the dominance of the serve these days those epic Borg/McEnroe contests are lost forever. In their place we get a match that goes for eleven hours because neither man could break the other’s serve. Not really edge-of-the-seat material, but then along comes Xan Brooks to put it all into surreal perspective. He was live-blogging, updating as the match progressed, watching the endless play as it took its toll on athlete and observer alike. At around 3:45 in the afternoon, when the fifth set was a mere thirty games old, Xan begins to wax poetic:
On and on they go. Soon they will sprout beards and their hair will grow down their backs, and their tennis whites will yellow and then rot off their bodies. And still they will stand out there on Court 18, belting aces and listening as the umpire calls the score. Finally, I suppose, one of them will die.
The zombies come out later, the angel never arrives to take the players up to heaven. And that, my friends, is how you make a boring sport interesting.
I was eliminated in round one of the Cyberspace Open (not even a near miss, I’m afraid), but that’s not going to stop me from cranking out a scene for round two! It will just stop me from working very hard on it.
Your PROTAGONIST has been betrayed by his CONFIDANT — someone deep within his (or her) inner circle. This betrayal threatens to destroy everything the protagonist has been working towards. The protagonist’s only ace in the hole: the confidant is not yet aware he’s been found out. Write a crackling scene in which the protagonist confronts the confidant.
I had a thought this morning that might help the one hundred talented folks who are moving on. The top three entries will be produced on video to determine the grand champion. If you think you have a shot, you might consider the produceability of your scene – will it shine in a low-budget video enactment? Zero gravity explosions being an integral part of the action might cost you in the long run.
I wish all of the contestants good luck, but especially the ones who have stopped by here to share advice. You guys rock!
Well, I got my score at the Cyberspace Open and I won’t be going on to the next round. I have mixed emotions about my score; some things I think could have been better aren’t even mentioned; other things I got dinged for are somewhat annoying.
I’ll start with the original assignment, for review (emphasis added by me):
Your protagonist is crushed. His or her plans have been dashed; his objective now appears impossible. And yet if he throws in the towel, bad things will happen. Write a scene in which a mentor, friend, love interest or enemy rallies or provokes your protagonist in an unexpected way. Be sure to give us your best dialogue here as your protagonist comes around and rises – or falls — to the occasion.
It’s a good prompt – it has specific goals but is a crucial moment in almost any plot.
Here’s the feedback for my entry:
Good basic concept behind this scene, though it’s a little tough to find rooting interest in Deek, simply because he’s such a downer. Igon’s appearance is a good turn, but it would have been great to see a little action at that point, if this bargain were to happen in the middle of a battle between the two as the bar gets trashed, ending in them making a pact but leaving total destruction in their wake. In other words, great setup but bigger visuals and movement would have made this scene much stronger.
My score: 83. One difference between this year’s contest and the previous is that we can see all the other scores and attendant feedback. 83 is… not very good. Below average; not sure about the median. So, how did my baby miss? I think in the end I was trying to squeeze a seven-minute scene into five minutes. Every tweak I made that added a line to the screenplay pushed the result over the five-page limit. Something else had to go.
Annoying thing #1: When faced with a decision of what to cut, I kept dialogue. I spent my time honing the words, revealing character through word choice, and so forth, at the expense of action. They said they wanted dialogue.
In retrospect, I should have ignored that bit of the prompt. They always want good dialogue. They also always want action. In the larger context of the story, big action would not work here. It’s not that moment in the story, and Igon works through guile. If I could have added another page to the scene, there would have been more action anyway; not bar-trashing action but more personal. Just… more visual. It was the visual stuff that didn’t make the cut to five pages.
Also, dialogue takes more time to judge properly. I doubt the judges read the entries out loud, for instance.
Many of the actions I chose to remove were smaller things, mannerisms and body language that help reveal character and motivation. Novels are full of that stuff. With a screenplay, that’s what the actor brings to the table. Putting too much of that stuff in the screenplay is called ‘directing from the script’ and is at best a waste of everyone’s time. Yet, for this contest, where we don’t have the history that comes before the scene, perhaps some of those actions would help the judge to get the feel for the characters. Pretty much all that was left was blocking.
Then again, it might have been as simple as having Deek trying to smash his bottle to use as a weapon, spewing beer all over the place, and maybe cutting himself in the process. Then there’d be blood…
So, yeah, I have to admit that more action would help the scene, perhaps a lot. Some of that was in there but fell to the ‘dialogue priority’. Back to Annoying thing #1. Next time…
The comment about it being “a little tough to find rooting interest in Deek” is a valid one. In the context of the story, we’ve had a long time to bond with him, to watch him pay the consequences for decisions that have gone wrong. In the scene, we just see him at the bottom, and the fact he’s not a very likable guy at that moment is important. But someone reading just this one scene won’t get any of that.
I have been a bit slow, I think, to recognize that writing for this contest and writing an actual movie scene are fundamentally different. For all the organizers say not to put in extra stuff that would normally be established earlier, they can’t judge the scene well without it. Writing a successful entry in this contest is more like writing a short film than the judges would care to admit – it’s just one with no resolution. Also, you need snappy dialog and action in your submission, whether or not your overall story wants it at that point or not.
On another tangent, remember what I said about the prompt being a crucial point in almost any plot? As I was working on my entry this time I began to wonder, “How many people will submit scenes they’ve already written?” Most of the entrants in this contest are aspiring screenwriters; almost all of those will have finished screenplays with a scene much like this in them. I was feeling a little guilty for writing a scene for a story I was already working on, though I did this scene from scratch. I was worried that some of my competition would be starting with works that they’ve been honing for a long time. I’m still not sure how I feel about this aspect of the contest. Is the honor system working? No way to tell, until the winner says “and I have the whole movie ready for an agent!”
I plan to write a scene this weekend for the second prompt, just for fun. Heck, why not? At the very least I can use it the way I did this one, to spur me to fill a hole in one of my other works in progress. I’ll post the result here as well, just for giggles.
If I decide to participate in the contest next time, I might use the characters from The Quest for the Important Thing to Defeat the Evil Guy. Since those characters appear in every fantasy novel ever written, I can avoid the catch-22 of having to establish the characters without establishing the characters.
On the Web site for the Cyberspace Open, it says “Judging is expected to take 3-4 weeks.” Now, I understand that’s not the same as saying “Judging will take at most four weeks,” but round two is this weekend and still no word on our scores from round one. It has now been over four weeks.
Note: Ooops! Looks like I missed one of the bullet points on the contest Web site, and the results are due by tomorrow at the latest. The rest of this episode was a bit of a rant (tempered with my belief that this is a cool contest), and at least part of what I said was unjustified.
Sorry, Cyberspace Open Guys!
I ran across The Fantasy Novelist’s Exam while reading the archives at Miss Snark’s no-longer-updated-but-certainly-not-dated blog. It’s a pretty funny list. The theory is that if you answer ‘yes’ to any of the questions, you should chuck in the novel and start again. Would that more people took this list seriously.
For giggles, I decided to see what the score would be for my epic fantasy work in progress, The Quest for the Important Thing to Defeat the Evil Guy. I’ve only included the questions here that I have meaningful answers to.
1. Does nothing happen in the first fifty pages?
Heck no! By the end of chapter one Bixby has been tormented by his distressigngly hot stepmother, met with an old kook who turns out to (also) be a wizard, and has been sent pajama-clad (with his axe) out into the rain to meet a mysterious bunch of people for some important job.
2. Is your main character a young farmhand with mysterious parentage?
Yes. Yes, he is exactly that.
3. Is your main character the heir to the throne but doesn’t know it?
Hm… that’s probably something that I should add…
4. Is your story about a young character who comes of age, gains great power, and defeats the supreme badguy?
How could it not be?
5. Is your story about a quest for a magical artifact that will save the world?
All hail the Important Thing! Whatever it is…
6. How about one that will destroy it?
All hail the Important Thing! Whatever it is…
7. Does your story revolve around an ancient prophecy about “The One” who will save the world and everybody and all the forces of good?
I’m pretty sure that there is a prophecy about Bixby. There are certainly some pretty racy prophecies about some of his companions.
8. Does your novel contain a character whose sole purpose is to show up at random plot points and dispense information?
You know, now that I think about it, QITDEG is lacking this rather annoying feature. Good thing this exam is here!
10. Is the evil supreme badguy secretly the father of your main character?
Oh my god! HOW DID YOU GUESS?!
11. Is the king of your world a kindly king duped by an evil magician?
Hmm… not yet.
12. Does “a forgetful wizard” describe any of the characters in your novel?
Insane would be closer, but we’ll say yes to this one.
13. How about “a powerful but slow and kind-hearted warrior”?
Everyone assumes that’s what Bixby is, but sometimes you have to wonder.
14. How about “a wise, mystical sage who refuses to give away plot details for his own personal, mysterious reasons”?
See #8 above
15. Do the female characters in your novel spend a lot of time worrying about how they look, especially when the male main character is around?
I think it would be more accurate to say that I spend a lot of time worrying about how they look, but the result is the same.
16. Do any of your female characters exist solely to be captured and rescued?
One of them might use it as a ploy, but for the most part they are not interested in being rescued by anyone.
17. Do any of your female characters exist solely to embody feminist ideals?
Yep. They are smokin-hot feminists.
18. Would “a clumsy cooking wench more comfortable with a frying pan than a sword” aptly describe any of your female characters?
No.
19. Would “a fearless warrioress more comfortable with a sword than a frying pan” aptly describe any of your female characters?
Hell, yeah.
20. Is any character in your novel best described as “a dour dwarf”?
I wouldn’t call her dour. She has a lovely beard as well.
21. How about “a half-elf torn between his human and elven heritage”?
No, but there will be plenty of half-elves should there ever be a sequel.
23. Does everybody under four feet tall exist solely for comic relief?
You mean Chavdar the horny halfling who would just as soon cut your throat as head-butt you in the nuts? Yeah, he’s pretty funny.
25. Do you not know when the hay baler was invented?
I hadn’t considered the humorous application of anachronism yet. Might be some potential there.
26. Did you draw a map for your novel which includes places named things like “The Blasted Lands” or “The Forest of Fear” or “The Desert of Desolation” or absolutely anything “of Doom”?
I haven’t drawn the (absolutely required) map yet, but “of Doom” will appear more than once.
27. Does your novel contain a prologue that is impossible to understand until you’ve read the entire book, if even then?
Not yet.
28. Is this the first book in a planned trilogy?
As little planning went into the still-incomplete first book, it would be hard to say yes to this (for now).
29. How about a quintet or a decalogue?
As long as people keep buying the crap, I’ll keep writing it!
30 – 32. [my summary] Is your novel a long-winded and directionless “epic”?
This is an action story, baby!
33. Is your name Robert Jordan and you lied like a dog to get this far?
Hah! I’m happy to report I’m not.
36. Do any of your main characters have apostrophes or dashes in their names?
What the hell kind of fantasy novel would it be otherwise? (Um… though actually, no. They are named for Eastern Eurpean automobiles.)
37. Do any of your main characters have names longer than three syllables?
Only if you include their “the’s”, e.g., Trabant the Immutable.
39. Does your novel contain orcs, elves, dwarves, or halflings?
Well, DUH!
41. Do you have a race prefixed by “half-“?
I expect Chavdar’s half-halfling progeny will have to wait for a sequel.
42. At any point in your novel, do the main characters take a shortcut through ancient dwarven mines?
Yes, not long after they take a shortcut through the mist-shrouded ruins of a once-mighty kingdom. Other suggestions for things they can take a shortcut through are welcome.
46. Do inns in your book exist solely so your main characters can have brawls?
If there’s another purpose of an ‘inn’, I’ve never heard it.
48. Do your characters spend an inordinate amount of time journeying from place to place?
Heck yeah! It’s a Quest!
49. Could one of your main characters tell the other characters something that would really help them in their quest but refuses to do so just so it won’t break the plot?
Oh, my characters keep secrets for iron-clad reasons!
55. Do you think horses can gallop all day long without rest?
No, but Bixby can come close.
56. Does anybody in your novel fight for two hours straight in full plate armor, then ride a horse for four hours, then delicately make love to a willing barmaid all in the same day?
Bixby is far too polite to make love to a barmaid, and wears a lot less.
57. Does your main character have a magic axe, hammer, spear, or other weapon that returns to him when he throws it?
You mean Orc-O-Matic? So far, Bixby has kept it firmly in hand.
61. Does your hero fall in love with an unattainable woman, whom he later attains?
Only one?
62. Does a large portion of the humor in your novel consist of puns?
Actually… no.
63. Is your hero able to withstand multiple blows from the fantasy equivalent of a ten pound sledge but is still threatened by a small woman with a dagger?
More ‘confused’ than ‘threatened’.
70. Does your main villain punish insignificant mistakes with death?
Helloooo! He’s Eeeeevil!
73. Is the countryside in your novel littered with tombs and gravesites filled with ancient magical loot that nobody thought to steal centuries before?
Not nearly enough.
74. Is your book basically a rip-off of The Lord of the Rings?
Closer to a rip-off of Bored of the Rings
75. Read that question again and answer truthfully.
Honest!
Let’s tally up the score then, shall we? By my count I hit on fifteen of the questions, and I’m in a gray area for a few others.
This list is awesome. Using it, I have been able to identify some glaring holes in the story. Should I ever get around to revising it, I’ll have a solid foundation to work from.
A couple of people have asked me what’s up with the ol’ Cyberspace Open. The short answer is that we’re in the waiting period while the judges wade through all the entries. You may have noticed by now that I’m rarely satisfied with the short answer.
The long answer is that last time the judges were a bit overwhelmed, and didn’t hit their deadlines. Being the clever humans they are, they allowed themselves more time for judging this spring. Round two of the contest goes from 5pm May 22 to 9am May 23. Or something like that.
Of course the added judging time gives me extra time as well, to go back over my entry and find more things I could have done better. Hopefully most of the other entrants are in the same boat. Time will tell.
I misreported about the contest format a while ago; while last fall there were three rounds, this time there are only two. In round two the remaining 100 contestants will have overnight to construct a dazzling scene. The top three of those scenes will be produced and put on the Interwebs for voting. To vote, one must subscribe to the contest sponsor’s mailing list, or something like that. If it matters, I’ll get back to you on that.
In previous years there was a third round with the top ten contestants, giving them 90 minutes to produce a masterpiece. I suspect that the quality of those entries was suspect, and that they went with the two-round format to have a better product to put on YouTube. Can’t say as I blame them.
Anyway, I’m continuing to cross fingers and toes and wait (mostly) patiently for the results. Will the judges like my work, or will they trip up on the parts I want to make better? Will they roll their eyes and say, “Vampires? Again?” (There are also four cash prizes for genre submissions, awarded based on round one entries. Unfortunately I expect that two-thirds of the entrants did some urban fantasy/horror thing, so the competition will be pretty fierce.)
I’ll probably be in Prague when my score comes out, but don’t worry, kids, I’ll be sure to let you know right away.
I have my entry almost ready to submit, and I have to say it’s turning into a pretty powerful scene. I thought of submitting now to prevent myself from editing the soul out of the piece the way I did last time, but I’m going to read the critique I got last time, then go over the current entry once more with the specific goal of editing more soul into it. I think it still needs a little kick to put it into the top 100.
It’s in the verbs, baby. Soul is in the verbs.
I’ve received several notes of encouragement from hither and yon, including one offer to have a shot of absinthe on my behalf. Now that’s support! After time has expired I will post my entry here, to see what you all think of it. In the end I went with writing the scene my novel needs, and the twist I came up with this weekend to make the scene work also provides some excellent grist for the novel. So, even if I don’t win fame and fortune in the contest, my story will benefit.
Update:
OK, I’ve submitted! 14 hours early, in fact. That doesn’t earn me extra points with the judges but it does stop me from driving myself crazy over every damn word for the next forthour. Thanks once again for the friends who sent their support, and especially those who helped me decide which scene to use and provided helpful feedback. The result is solid, but does it sparkle? Does it change the way people think about film as an art form?
Well, no. But it’s not bad. I will post it here once submissions are closed.
Here’s the prompt. Talk among yourselves. I’ll be brainstorming for a little while.
Your protagonist is crushed. His or her plans have been dashed; his objective now appears impossible. And yet if he throws in the towel, bad things will happen. Write a scene in which a mentor, friend, love interest or enemy rallies or provokes your protagonist in an unexpected way. Be sure to give us your best dialogue here as your protagonist comes around and rises – or falls — to the occasion.
* * *
Results of my musings, one day later.
I think one movie that captures this scene particularly well is Happy Gillmore, when his “Happy Place” is overrun by the evil forces that are dogging him. You have to appreciate a flick that can make that dark moment so entertaining. So far, my attempts to come up with a lighter scenario have come up empty.
Interestingly, this prompt is a scene that the novel I’m working on right now desperately needs. So there’s the whole two-birds-with-one-stone synergy going on. I’ll be drafting that scene tonight. What’s hanging me up right now is the word ‘unexpected’ in the prompt. I know when I find just the right button to push on the protagonist that it will be really sweet.
I just finished a rough draft of my other candidate and I’m pretty happy with the way it turned out. Still needs some work, and this time I’ll pay special attention to accentuating the individuality and unique voice of each character. One thing about this idea – it would be really easy to pitch to a producer. I have a hard time summing up most of my ideas into and “elevator pitch” but this one summarizes so nicely into a shining nugget of marketability that I’m a little hesitant to let it out on its own just yet. We’ll see.
Hope everyone else is doing well!
