‘Notions of past and present hold no sway here’ – The Undercover Soundtrack, Andrew James

My guest this week describes his novel as having a subliminal soundtrack that wormed into his head and influenced the period, the tone, characters and the ties that connect them. The novel, Blow Your Kiss Hello, is a mystery and a thriller with a bit of Other too. It’s the story of a man searching beyond the boundaries of here and now in the hope of finding his missing girlfriend. It’s set mostly in the 1990s with threads of 1640, a crossing that becomes apparent as Faithless meets Henry Purcell’s opera Dido and Aenas. He is Andrew James and he’s on the Red Blog with his Undercover Soundtrack.

‘Songs to capture sadness, isolation and heartache’ – The Undercover Soundtrack, Stacy Green

It’s an extra pleasure to be hosting this week’s guest. For a number of years we’ve corresponded about agents, publishing options and writing questions, and many of her queries have resulted in useful posts. Now here she is with her first novel, a romantic thriller called Into the Dark, published by MuseItUp. If you guessed she needed a dark soundtrack you wouldn’t be far wrong. She is Stacy Green and she’s on the Red Blog with her Undercover Soundtrack.

The ‘Let’s get this straight’ scene – and how to use it with style

If you’re old enough to remember the TV series Charlie’s Angels, there was always a scene about halfway through where our feisty gals recapped everything they knew about the current case.

Crass though it sounds when described like that, viewers were probably grateful.

There are two reasons. First of all, it can provide a welcome breather from the hurly-burly – especially if the rest of the time has been spent in breathless danger. No matter how exciting your plot, readers can only take so much before they get numbed and will welcome a lull where everyone can relax.

Second – more obviously – it’s useful if you’ve got a complicated plot with lots of twists, turns, red herrings, thrills and spills. By having a ‘you are here’ moment, it lets the reader refocus on what’s been learned and what the stakes are.

But this can easily descend into exposition – explaining information for the sake of the audience in a way that seems unnatural. It can also be a yawn if it doesn’t move matters on in some way. Of course, your characters could spot a missing link or a deadline, which would galvanise everyone. But there are plenty of other ways to give this kind of scene more pizzazz.

Creating romantic sizzle

I saw the ‘let’s get it straight’ scene deployed very nicely in a manuscript I recently critiqued. Two characters who had been thrown together in a dangerous investigation found themselves with time to breathe – and to discuss what they should do about the trouble they were in. Also, the trust this had built up was leading to an intriguing sizzle between them. By this time, we’d have happily watched them discuss their laundry lists, because we were really reading their reactions.

Cementing a friendship

In Dark Lord : The Teenage Years by Jamie Thomson, the mysterious main character Dirk explains for the first time where he’s really from and what he’s trying to do. This is the first time he’s taken his friends into his confidence – and we’re waiting to see their reaction.

Planting seeds obliquely

In Strong Poison by Dorothy L Sayers, Lord Peter Wimsey is trying to clear Harriet Vane of murder. Half-way through there’s a scene where he reluctantly visits his family for Christmas and they talk about the case and what they think about Harriet (deft use of a recap, as Peter Wimsey doesn’t want to be there). They also talk about another family member who is – perhaps daringly- marrying a Jewish girl, which draws our attention to love across boundaries. It also plants the seeds for (spoiler alert!) his ultimate proposal to Harriet.

For laughs

Or you could be delightfully silly, like this scene from Carry On Screaming where the detectives list their clues and stand back to learn from the result.

Thanks for the top pic, wolfgangfoto

The ‘let’s get this straight’ scene is often necessary to keep an audience on track with a complex plot, but it can do so much more. Do you have any examples of it, good or clumsy? Share in the comments!

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‘It’s all about capturing the emotion’ – The Undercover Soundtrack, Laura Pauling

Living with a teenage daughter is a bonus when you’re putting together a writing soundtrack for a teen spy trilogy, but my guest this week compiled her playlist as much for tone and sound as for lyrics. She is Laura Pauling, and she’s over at the red blog talking about the Undercover Soundtrack to A Spy Like Me.

New Year special – writing sins that scupper a story Part 4: Did You Hear About The Morgans?

Weak story links, lazy plotting, wrong point of view, unsatisfying endings… Although Chez Morris we’ve taken time off from writing, we’ve seen some DVDs that have roused me to write posts of protest. So, to keep your critical faculties ticking over until life resumes as normal, I thought I’d share them with you in this five-part mini-series. (And yes, beware spoilers…)

 

Today: Did You Hear About The Morgans?

Did You Hear About The Morgans? features a couple from New York who are separating. Out one evening to discuss their divorce, they witness a crime and are forced to go to a safe house, in a tiny town hundreds of miles away from the city.

This sounds like a great concept –danger, soul-searching, an unsophisticated town to put the New Yorkers back in touch with what really matters.

Writing sin 1: story delivers on expectations only superficially and not deeply

Did You Hear About The Morgans? delivers on none of the promises, except in the most mechanical way. There are a number of mishaps and small-town oddities, but they seem to operate only to set up superficial and unsatisfying pratfalls later.

There are nominal attempts to get the Morgans involved in the community – Mrs Morgan, who is a real estate agent, helps the doctor to sell his house, and Mr Morgan, a lawyer, helps an ornery old grump to write a will. None of these have payoffs later, or are particularly funny, or – most important – challenge the characters at any personal level. They seem to have been put in only to show that the Morgans had jobs, and to make the community like them. But in a story like this we want the change to be the other way round – the main characters have to grow to like the community and thus have discovered some new values.

Taking the Morgans out of New York didn’t force them to act in new ways, so there was nothing gained by doing it. All it seems to mean to them is that they miss their lattes, vegetarian restaurants and the internet. This story is partly a fish out of water scenario – and should be more than simply a way to force characters to spend time together. The setting should be instrumental in the characters’ change.

Writing sin 2: wooden characters

This is the central problem. The main characters are wooden. They never discover anything about themselves. It’s a story about a reconciled relationship, but we never see how the two Morgans relate to each other now, what they were like at the start, what had gone bad and how it changed.

There are hints at fertility problems and conflict about starting a family, but these look as if they have been flung in in a desperate attempt to press emotional hot keys, rather than being thought through.

The characters also don’t live up to the professions the writers gave them. Mrs Morgan ran a company so famous that she was on the cover of a glossy magazine. Mr was a high-powered lawyer. They should have had some corresponding personality traits, such as tenacity, ruthlessness and ingenuity. When people like that are in conflict with each other, particularly emotional conflict, they should become ugly. It looked like nobody wanted to risk making the Morgans a bit nasty. This misses the point of a story like this. If they don’t bring nasty traits out in each other at the start, they have no way to mellow at the end.

Writing sin 3: changing the story direction without putting enough work into the new elements This is just a guess, but it looks to me as though Did You Hear About The Morgans? started life as a thriller. Probably a lot of that material was taken out, but the thriller elements that remain (including how the hitman tracks them) are the best honed and have obviously had multiple drafts.

Also, the supporting cast are far better realised than the main characters. Although they have less screen time, each of them gives us a sense of a real person with aims, hobbies and troubles – conspicuously lacking in the main characters.

It looks like the film was rewritten in a hurry, but nobody paid any attention to working through the main characters properly.

 

Tomorrow: Sherlock Holmes