Back to the Future…
The Next Kris and Dean Show…
That’s right, Kris and I are going to take apart on video the 40-year-old-movie BACK TO THE FUTURE.
We watched half of it tonight and will watch the other half tomorrow and then record the three hours of videos on Monday and Tuesday and it will come out the next day.
Wow does this movie still stand up perfectly.
We are going to be talking about plotting, information flow (a lot), pacing, characters, and so much more. And I hope in an entertaining way.
The Kris and Dean Show Does Die Hard is also still up.
So until this launches on Wednesday, you can get THE KRIS AND DEAN SHOW DOES BACK TO THE FUTURE for $50. Then after launch it goes to $75.
Trust me, you will learn a ton about story telling and writing and plotting and information flow and characters and so much more after listening to Kris and I take this movie apart to show you how it is done.
And this movie could have been written this way in prose form easily.
MARBLE GRANT KICKSTARTER…
The special stretch goal is going great. Help us pass the word to get more fun fiction and workshops for writers.
Here is the link to it. Marble Grant Kickstarter
STORY CHALLENGE…
Story tonight was a very whacked-out Bryant Street story called “Next Tenants.” Actually got writing this afternoon and then got back to it in the early evening before turning to doing workshop and Pulphouse stuff. Then back with it after midnight again. So it felt a lot, lot better, giving myself the time.
Getting closer on the new Shopify store and I am getting closer to putting the first couple of collections together.
We almost have lift-off.
I also did a list off the top of my head of some of my series that have short stories involved. Just so I have it to glance at. I think I have done three or four stories so far not in a series, and started one brand new series and brand.
Today when I glanced at the list of series, I realized I had not added in Bryant Street. I am sure I have missed a number of other series on my master list.
6 Comments
About Martin L. Shoemaker
I’m watching the Back to the Future episodes now, and I really like the theme of information flow. It’s an incredibly useful perspective.
But there’s something you said that I disagree with, and it leads me to a real question. You said the audience would have thought that Einstein disintegrated. But we didn’t. We all knew we were watching a movie called Back to the Future. Virtually all of us had seen trailers. We knew it was a time travel movie, and Doc Brown had just uttered technobabble about a chrono experiment. Marty may have been surprised, but we all knew that Einstein had traveled in time. If we paid really close attention, we knew he was one minute in the future.
Different movie, similar situation: In Jurassic Park, Spielberg did this long, suspenseful build up to surprise us with the first view of a dinosaur; but every single person in the theater knew it was a dinosaur movie. I don’t remember the ads and posters, but I’m sure they were full of dinosaurs.
So I wonder: As a writer, just how much effort should you put into tension and surprises that you can almost certainly foresee will be spoilered by the title, the cover blurb, and the marketing? When an editor approaches the manuscript before it has any marketing, they may not know that it’s a dinosaur story, but the reader almost certainly will.
I struggle with this sometimes. I ask myself if I’m really surprising anyone. And I wonder if instead of trying to surprise the reader, I can use this incidental foreknowledge as a part of how the story unfolds, perhaps as a form of foreshadowing.
OK, I still have 22 videos to go, so I’d better get back to them. Thanks!
dwsmith
Marty thought Einstein had been disintegrated, NOT THE AUDIENCE. They would be ahead of the main character which is why this sort of thing works. Of course the dog was not hurt, and the audience for all the reasons you said knew that, but the main character did not. That creates tension.
Nothing was hidden from the audience as you said. So if i said the audience thought that, I misspoke and was not what I meant. Marty thought that, no one else.
You never want to surprise your audience. Ever. You want to surprise your main character with the audience ahead of the chraacter.
Rob Cornell
“You never want to surprise your audience. Ever. You want to surprise your main character with the audience ahead of the chraacter.”
What about stories with major twists or even twist endings (like The Sixth Sense)? I remember seeing The Sixth Sense in theaters before all the spoilers hit. I was definitely surprised.
Or am I misunderstanding what you mean by never surprising the audience?
dwsmith
Rob, go back and watch the 6th Sense. Right from the start the writers told the audience exactly what was happening, even to the point of having the kid talking to Bruce and saying, “I see dead people.”
So the fact that the audience was surprised was not by hiding information but by masterful information flow. Nothing hidden.
Rob Cornell
Ah, okay. I gotcha. Always play fair with the reader. Yeah, that actually makes it even MORE shocking, because the truth was right there the whole time. Fun stuff.
Nathan Haines
The Sixth Sense was probably the last major time that everyone as a society proactively worked to avoid spoilers for anyone who hadn’t seen the movie.
I didn’t watch it until it was out on video, and the reveal is insane because everything is absolutely right there but because we’re seeing everything from Bruce Willis’s perspective, we interpret everything the same way he does until about 2 seconds before he realizes what’s really going on.
To get a writer friend to back the latest Kickstarter campaign, I mentioned “You know, Dean says every great story tells you exactly how it will end right at the beginning. For example, he says Die Hard tells you exactly how it’ll end in the first 10 minutes and I rewatched it after he said that and almost fell off the couch,” and sent an excerpt of the script where McClain is talking to the taxi driver, and it blew my friend’s mind, he’s seen Die Hard at least 20 times and had never thought of that, and he immediately jumped on the Kickstarter.
Since you don’t turn in assignments for classic workshops, and I haven’t done those specific ones, I told my friend if he does the homework I’ll do them too and we can share with each other, so now that’s the plan.