POV

I'm finding myself with a lack of blog topics; I spent the weekend reading a ton of stuff for my job, without anything amusing coming up along the way.

I haven't seen a movie in what feels like ages, though the only thing out there I'm truly tempted by is "Jackass Number 2" (seriously), though since my wife refuses to see it I may have to take it in sometime this week while she's at work.

If I do, rest assured, I'll blog about it.

Last night I finally curled up with the rewrite of my supernatural thriller again, after not touching it for a few days. On the agenda was one of the notes that everyone gave me: beef up the villain.

My problem is that I tend to tell stories the same way -- I pick a central character, and as the tale goes along they are in every scene. Thinking back, this hasn't varied much; my frozen-time script is the only one that really breaks this mold, because it has two main characters who are apart for stretches.

The horror script I have been noodling around with jumps around from characters a lot, and the teen ensemble comedy I once did a lot of notes on them put into hibernation would be, if I write it, a real stretch -- think "Dazed and Confused" in the way that it constantly cuts between a large number of characters' stories.

The incredibly-low-paid-rewrite I recently blogged about was also sort of an ensemble piece, and I think in the long run that might be the best lesson I get from that exercise, about just bouncing around from story to story.

Unfortunately, my main-character-in-every-scene-template has a big flaw: If you are telling the type of story where there is an antagonist, and the main character and the antagonist spend the second act apart, the antagonist is going to drop out of the story for a long time.

And that was my problem in my supernatural thriller. I actually had a little scene, in which we leave the main character for about half a page, and pop in to what the villain is doing, only to rush back to the safety of the main character's POV very quickly.

But in the past few weeks, I've been musing on ways to pump up the villain's story, because it's important -- the rule that certain kinds of tales are only as strong as their villains is true.

One of my previous problems was that the villain was also offscreen in act 2 because he pretty much wasn't doing anything; he was just kind of waiting for act 3 to roll around.

Not good.

So I came up with two new sequences for him, that give him some real second-act action, which not only sets up the third act stuff even better, but which gives him some more development as a character (which was always a problem as well).

Plus it feeds the urgency of the tale; now we're reminded that not only is the villain out there, but he is taking action that is bringing him closer to the main character.

In retrospect, it seems obvious, but again I was caught in the idea that I wanted the main character in every scene, which works here in acts 1 and 3, when the main character and the villain are brought into proximity a lot.

But now the bad guy gets his scenes too, and the script is all the better for it.

I guess the lesson is that when you are figuring out the way you want to tell your story, you need to be able to bend a bit, to fit in with the particular demands of the story you are about to tell.

But no, Brett, there still aren't any lesbians. Or midgets.