Welcome to Fiction Forge Indy! We are a group of four writers in Indianapolis that love to talk about anything that has to do with writing. We all met at the Indiana Writers Center and come from four very different backgrounds with interests in Fantasy, Mystery, Humor, Romance, and Historical Fiction. Prepare to be informed and entertained! Oh --and by the way, we hope you share your thoughts on the craft of writing, too.
Hollywood's Bloated Ending Problem (Writing Advice) from Brandon McNulty
Just thought I'd share another video from Brandon. This one talks about endings, and he makes a good reference to Alien: Romulus. After my last post, I thought this was kinda interesting.
Not only that, but the videos Brandon McNulty does with these Good vs. Bad are lots of fun.
So, I've talked about a bunch of plot flaws, and in the end, they are really more like tools for the proverbial toolbox.
When the professionals (no, I'm not putting myself in this camp) use them well, we sit back and enjoy the clever manipulation. It's a beautiful discovery how they use the tools and break them.
What I find so interesting is something I discover and rediscover in writing: all the good writers break the rules. And when they do it well, we enjoy it.
How do we do it?
I think the only way we can learn how to break the rules is to learn the rules. Love the rules. Study the rules.
And then break them. Not all at once in one swoop, but one at a time, finding the balance between the expected and the unexpected, the novel and the formula.
So I'm going to end this series on plots!
Break rules like not using no exclamation marks!!!
BTW: Alfred Hitchcock apparently coined this term with a great anecdote about Scottish lions. Here's an essay by Michael Kurland that starts with this story: The Writer's Toolbox
Far as I can tell, it's an unexplained plot device that catalyzes action. MacGuffins drive the central movement of the story, but the driving goal or object isn't necessarily explained.
Funny, most of the examples I have run across have some explanations and meaning, but the main point of the MacGuffin is that the explanation either doesn't matter, is meaningless, or is superficial.
Let's look at a couple:
Rosebud. The last words of Citizen Kane drive the entire plot of this movie. Funny thing about this movie is that the basic implication (spoiler alert! but then again, if you haven't seen this movie, a curse on you) is that only the audience knows what "rosebud" means. No one else in the movie will understand what this means. By the way, what did Kane really mean?
Hamlet's father's ghost. The words of the ghost drive Hamlet's actions and the plot for the play, but in the end, the ghost is right. The tension in the play is watching how Hamlet comes to understand everything. I wonder what this play would look like if the ghost had been wrong....
The Maltese Falcon. This one keeps coming up. The basic premise here is that a really valuable thing is driving the action of the plot, but what the item is, doesn't really matter. In the end, greed drives the plot.
Mostly, I'm loosely calling this a plot flaw because I think that the professionals can work this extraordinarily well. If you don't know what you're doing, a MacGuffin may just look foolish, like your characters are chasing after butterflies.
Willingful suspension of disbelief (also willing suspension of disbelief, but I learned the term as willingful).
This basically means that if you do a good job, the reader will go anywhere with you. If establish good parameters and establish the world well, the reader will travel with you. The reader willingly suspends their belief to travel through fiction (and in particular, fantasy and science fiction) to go on an adventure.
And readers know when you start to lie and deviate from the rules.
Basically, we have two rules with which to work.
Make the world believable with lots of details.
Make the people believable with lots of humanity.
Take The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe. This world is fairly simply. The rules basically involve talking animals, some magic, and a winter that never ends--which, if you have ever lived in Minnesota or apparently the Northern Plains this year, is fairly convincing. Also, we travel into this world with a group of kids that learn about the rules with us.
Then, we need to believe the characters. The siblings interact like four children who are siblings. When Edmund betrays the others, we believe it, especially if we have siblings.
The interesting thing about the willingful suspension of disbelief is when a writer breaks them.
Take Brazil again. You can almost point to the moment in the movie when you can't believe in the world anymore--it has broken from the rules. We know it, the filmmaker knows it, and we start to roll our eyes. We know this isn't going to work.
And then, we know the filmmaker is just playing with us. Terry pushed us and played with us, and we realize it.
And even though Terry broke the rules, we play along. Mostly, we're okay with it.
Here's a video that should be funny but isn't really. Nonetheless, it has a great breakdown of the guidelines of suspension of disbelief:
I shouldn't enjoy the flaws as much as I do. Something wonderful come out of looking at the flaws. I find something even more amazing in finding "flaws" that work well. Despite the rules, I love finding a broken rule that somehow defies logic. And is beautiful. Here's another one. Retroactive Continuity. This is a new term for me, but the concept is familiar. Basically, the author--or perhaps team of writers--changes the history to coincide with new plots. This happens in comic books, I imagine, but I bring up another movie (my, I haven't been reading much these days, have I?). I watched the latest installment in the Terminator franchise last weekend. I love a good Terminator movie, and this one exercised some expansive retroactive continuity. Kyle Reese travels back from the future to find a new Sarah Connor (not the buff and tough Linda Hamilton we all loved) who is witty but softer and knows about Reese and John and doesn't have the awesome muscles.
Oh, and then John travels back from the future and tries to kill both Reese and Sarah. Yep, he's the bad guy. Did I mention that this was going to be a spoiler alert? Sorry. Point is that this movie stretches the limits of retroactive continuity. And yet we expect it. We roll our eyes and wish Linda were the only Sarah Connor they could use in these movies, but somehow, we go with it. This leads me to the next installment, the willingful suspension of disbelief.... Coming soon.
