The Killing Zoetrope
Last month I joined an online movie studio, which includes workshops for the literary magazine All-Story. I also bought the movie The Killing Fields. And Killing Zoe is the name of a movie based on a Quentin Tarantino screenplay. I'm cleaver.
A week ago today I joined the Zoetrope Virtual Studio, a free online workshop for prospective filmmakers. According to the website:
In March of 1998 Francis Coppola launched a website where writers could submit their short stories to his magazine, Zoetrope: All-Story. A community of writers quickly formed around the website. It became so popular so quickly that a few months later he created sites for novellas and screenplays.
The Virtual Studio, which launched in June 2000, brings together the original sites as departments, plus includes new departments for other creative endeavors. Members can workshop a wide-range of film arts, including music, graphics, design, and film & video, as well as access some of the best e-collaboration tools. This site is the culmination of more than four years of work.
The website features a wide variety of skill building, from writing to art design to film editing and production. The writing section accepts poetry, flash fiction, short screenplays, feature screenplays, and novelettes. Both members as well as American Zoetrope representatives can review your writing. You must review a certain number of other people’s works for each submission you wish to make. The reviews act as credits with which you purchase a submission. I call reviews on Zoetrope “Z-reviews.”
At the time I joined, the website allowed me to submit one story in each category first, and then review other people’s stories-an obvious enticement to get people’s feet wet. Since stage plays don’t appear to be acceptable, none of my short stories reflect my current writing theory, and my feature film play isn’t finished, I submitted the then-latest draft of “A Simple Matter”.
The Opinions of Assholes
So far the Virtual Studio counts seven reads of my submission. Two members wrote reviews. The first guy panned me:
Hard to tell exactly what the piece is about as it meanders all over the place, and seems to have no central premise behind it - we have the kids going to see the police raid on suspected killers, which dominatesthe first half of the story, and oneo fthe kids seems to have the shining style visions and troubling headaches, - the descriptions of the house, and the road journeyt to it are quite well handled, but the characters rarely stand out at all. The sense of ant-radicalism is strong. It shows in the hostiliityto Communism, characters having respect for the Klan and Oswald Mosely, etc, and a record shop which is reluctant to sell Frabnnk Zappa records - the hostility to hippies is also strong, - it's a very redneck piece - the trouble is that we don't really stay with any strand o fthe story to any conclusion - we know little of the murders, the references to the killing of the squaw woman are vague and never fully developed - there is rather too much emphasis on people puking and emptying their bladders... I don't fiond it offensive, just repetitive and almost tiresome - a very dissapointing piece [sic, sic, sic!].
One APC wrote this review. His Virtual Studio bio lists him as an English “writer, poet, and Secular Humanist.” Mr. C points out he was once a brainwashed member of a cult, and part of his writing motivation comes from a desire to overshadow this experience with something more positive, or as he puts it, “so that he will be remembered first and foremost as a writer rather than just as ‘that bloke who was in some weird cult.’” He runs a website and claims to have gotten several pieces in print and on CD.
Regardless of bio, he’s certainly entitled to his opinion; this is what I put my story up for. But I did not put my story up to be rushed through as review credit fodder. It’s obvious that APC didn’t read or review my story very thoroughly.
Mr. C seems to be a rapid writer, as his Z review, his, bio and his novella submissions appear riddled with the sort of spelling typos and run-ons common to people who bang away without looking over what they just wrote. C’s novelette “Babel” also reveals something about him: he’s a popcorn Stephen King-style writer. I’m reviewing “Babel” for a submission credit and it seems to me C very much favors a lot of narrative exposition-a lot of telling rather than showing. The story itself appears to be straight-forward science fiction thriller with a dobbing of satire and no theme or symbolic pretensions. Reading it reminds me quite a bit of Stephen King’s “The End of the Whole Mess” found in the King short horror anthology Nightmares and Dreamscapes.
So I guess his opinion isn’t much of a surprise-he was looking only for plot and he didn’t even pay much attention to that. His review bristles with factual errors about events in the story as well as being void of any recognition of any deeper meaning. His complaint about the lack of conflict thread conclusions also tells me he expected the plot to wrap itself up at the end in a neat little bow, an expectation I aimed to dash in the first place. In Lane Millet’s writing workshop, even Jim McKnight would hammer C for being superficial, and I felt Jim operated on different ideas than me on what constituted depth. This isn’t Lane Millet’s classes though. So the review was unsurprising and mostly unhelpful.
Fortunately, VS allows writers to rate the quality and helpfulness of reviews, and people who write good reviews get recognized on the website. This system seems to be another layer of control to enforce discipline, since I can rate Chappell’s review low and thus diminish his exposure. But since I believe I do have unresolved threads in the draft, I didn’t give Chappell the worst rating. He is correct that some bits are not as tied as tightly as I think they should be.
Which makes his “numerical rating” all the more irritating to me. The guy rated me “good” on quality of writing, but “poor” on originality, plot, character, and overall. The score seems contradictory, and excessively harsh, but understandable given that Mr. Chappell basically glossed over everything and dashed off a review so he could get a submission credit for “Babel”, which he posted a couple days later.
A good thing then members can’t read reviews of other people’s stories. Nobody except maybe website administrators and talent scouts can view Chappell’s review of my story. This helps reduce prejudice since many people might not look past the first negative review or two.
My second review wasn’t much better. It seemed about as rushed as Chappell’s. Both reviews read like emails. But Everett Ray Swift at least seemed like he tried to pay attention and criticize in more detail:
It is a good story, I enjoyed reading it. The charaters are interesting and it had a good plot..
I did get confused in some parts for example in shaws story im not sure who is telling it. Is it Adam or some one else?
"it shook the few teethpanes of glass that hadn’t been chipped from those yawning mouths those window mouths gnashing and yawning the windows bellowed shotgun and barked carbine and a revolver not unlike the one I shot that squaw bitch in the face with"
I really had a hard time understanding the above sentence, I dont get the reference of the shootin the squaw part, if Adam is a boy and I assume he is although I dont recall his age being mentioned how did he do it? It's hard to tell what time period Adam lives in, he seems to be in more modern times but them it seem he is in the 1800's in other parts.
somehow I must have missed somthing.
The way you spelled the words the way Mr.Cee for example said them added color and depth to the story.
I usually don't commit on grammer or formatting because that really has nothing to do with how good a story is but you did a good job on them.
Some of the subject matter or words you used could be offensive to some people but I had no problem with it.
Sometimes to tell a good story it a risk one has to take [sic, sic, sic!].
Still, he too panned me in the numerical rating, though as “fair” instead of poor.
Both reviewers seemed to rate my writing as “good.” Which again seems contradictory to me given their apparent confusion or disdain for the plot; such is the inadequacy of the website scoring system. It also teaches me something about the story’s own inadequacy. Mr. Millet pointed out to me I needed to expand the story: to give it breathing room and to alleviate confusion. These Z-reviews confirmed his assessment in my mind. For all my defense and concern, these reviews give me probably exactly what I need to know: that even if the prose demand that people use their brains, the plot must be comprehensible. Both must work together to carry people to the theme.
An Expansive Matter
One of the top strategies I decided back in my active duty days was to provide a compelling plot as well as a compelling theme.
I wished my fiction concise and implicit like Hemingway. His prose inspires me to show instead of tell.
I also want people to stick around for the show. For people find Hemingway’s prose exceedingly dull. My grandfather Ranzoni said as much. And I’m not the only high school student who found The Sun Also Rises (1926) too fucking boring to bother hunting out the theme, let alone owning a copy of the book. People on Amazon.com also bitch about how dull they find that book.
Part of the boredom comes from Hemmingway’s use of passive voice as a style, but much of it comes from threadbare plots. “Cat in the Rain”, “Hills Like White Elephants”, “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place”, and other Hemingway stories are pretty much all heart among little action. The aforementioned short stories, for example, all read like somebody sitting around a contemporary setting and listening in on somebody else’s life. The characters in each story sit or stand around a hotel room or a train station or a bar and talk and look at stuff and that’s the plot. A brilliant means of discussing relevant themes. But very boring for people who enjoy Stephen King and Tom Clancy books.
Those people matter. I need to appeal to as many people as possible so they will own copies of my book. That’s just sound and simple survival.
It’s all well and good Hemingway wrote entirely for theme; it got his name imbedded into academic circles if nothing else, but that’s not optimal survival. Human societies are notorious for erasing history to control the present, and erasure includes burning books and killing the people who read them. And there’s always the possibility that a disease or giant meteor or something will devastate civilization. Finally, people simply grow bored with stuff.
Meanwhile, I have to be able to make enough money or credit just to survive long enough to write stories. I don’t know if Hemingway was ever popular enough to make a good full-time living from writing fiction before he committed suicide. I get the impression that he worked on and off for years as a correspondent and that much of his celebrity had to do with his off-page antics. I also get the impression he got by through family financial help [I since learned Hemingway became very popular and rich with his last few novels, especially The Old Man and the Sea].
I do know Hemingway would never popularize his style in America today because his writing would be too smart and too boring for the masses who eat King and Clancy. Though academics and literati credit the man as one of the most influential American writers, and cite him as a catalyst in American literature, the times have once again changed.
Meanwhile, science fiction giant Frank Herbert expressed the attitude that all fiction should be entertaining or people won’t pay attention, thus wasting the writing effort. Even in my limited high school experience I immediately agreed. Herbert shared Hemingway’s concise writing but wrote more exciting and explicit plots. And for the record, my own father still considers Dune (1965) to be a dry and difficult read.
Dune, however, showed me Hemingway’s writing theory can be adapted and altered to the times. Herbert winks noticeably at implication rather than allowing implication to speak for itself as Hemingway does, and he tends to tackle somewhat broader and more dispassionate themes in the Herbert novels I’ve read. But I think Dune one of the best and most important books I’ve read.
So I feel I should write at least some stories with compelling plots as well as with compelling themes in order to maximize exposure breadth and duration. To that end I worked out what I can do to improve “A Simple Matter".
But enough writing about writing; I need to write instead.
Lifting the Veil
What’s most important seems to be that I’m writing obsessively instead of playing games obsessively. Once I get my new hard drive I’ll probably go on a gaming binge; the urge to play is pretty bad actually. But so is the urge to write.
I’m in the home stretch of Apokalupsis Har. About 91 pages complete. It will end with a deliberate sequel ending and I Once I finished these last three or four scenes I expect to have a complete first draft running between 120 and 130 pages; I don’t want it running longer, and I might cut it down to help the marketability. 90 minute movies appear to be the current trend in
Speaking of Marketing, I feel concern about how I’m going to sell AH, and even if I will sell it. I really need the money right now, but the days of skinny young college graduates walking into an agent’s office and selling their first screenplay for $400,000 are probably long gone. Shane Black did that. He went to UCLA, wrote one script that didn’t sell, then showed his agent the speculation screenplay for Lethal Weapon and picked up four hundred grand. By his third accepted screenplay, Black could command 6.2 million dollars. That’s because of the action movie climate in the mid-1980’s. And because of the cocaine.
Ten years later, Quentin Tarantino barely made $50,000 grand for selling the screenplay of True Romance. His movies are a million times better than the Shane Black-based films I’ve seen. Jeremy considers Tarantino to be a Mirimax Studios golden boy, and Quentin’s second film Pulp Fiction put him on the contemporary hip map like no other film director. Only $50,000 for his first script-he was a high-return investment.
These days, Hollywood is all about no-risk remake movies and anybody can write a remake. Once Hollywood acquired the rights to Black’s Lethal Weapon the studios could simply make some intern or secretary write the sequels for nothing, which results in an enormous franchise profit. Tarantino only got paid as much as he did because he was a writer’s guild member.
I am going to investigate being a guild member. Right now I’m going to investigate my bed.