Lester Dent’s Fiction Formula

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Dent2
I got this email from "Bigby" today:

Lester Dent, the pulp writer who created Doc Savage
(and I believe wrote all or most of the Shadow stories) and God knows how many
others once gave his formula for any 6000 word pulp story… which is EXACTLY
the four-act structure for TV. He even breaks those six thousand words into four,
1500 word acts…Absolutely fascinating.

Bigby is right.  Dent’s formula reads almost exactly like the four-act structure of an episodic teleplay. For example, here is how Dent describes the first 1500 words of a story:

  1. First line, or as near thereto as possible, introduce the hero
    and swat him with a fistful of trouble. Hint at a mystery, a menace or
    a problem to be solved–something the hero has to cope with.
  2. The hero pitches in to cope with his fistful of trouble. (He
    tries to fathom the mystery, defeat the menace, or solve the problem.)
  3. Introduce ALL the other characters as soon as possible. Bring
    them on in action.
  4. Hero’s endevours land him in an actual physical conflict near the
    end of the first 1500 words.
  5. Near the end of first 1500 words, there is a complete surprise
    twist in the plot development.

That’s pretty darn close to what the first Act of any episode has to accomplish. The first Act sets up the central conflicts of the story:  what the hero has at stake, what others have at stake, what his goals are and the obstacles that prevent him from achieving his aims. Dent says much the same thing, only in a different words ("He
tries to fathom the mystery, defeat the menace, or solve the problem."). Dent’s advice is worth taking — whether you are writing a thrilling short story or a spec episode of a TV show.

Hollywood & Crime

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Hollywood
Here’s  sneak peek at the rough cover for HOLLYWOOD AND CRIME, the new anthology edited by the prolific Robert Randisi (author of over 400 novels!). My contribution to this anthology, which comes out in February,  is a short story entitled "Jack Webb’s Star." My friends Max Allan Collins, Stuart Kaminsky, Michael Connolly, Paul Guyot, Dick Lochte, Gary Phillips and Gar Haywood are just a few of the other authors who have contributed stories, all of which feature at least one scene at the corner of Hollywood & Vine (Les Roberts, whose name is featured on the rough cover, unfortunately has had to bow out).

Attacking Copyright

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One of the big arguments fanficcers like to make is that copyright is too restrictive and that the rules should be loosened up. Once something is published, they argue, it should belong to the world.

The fanfic take on copyright is one championed, oddly enough, by proponents of Google’s effort to digitize books into their database. The New York Times ran a piece a week or two ago in which Wired contributor Kevin Kelly argued in favor a digital library that would make all books available for free to people around the world. He believes that the original purpose of copyright was to give authors an incentive to keep working, but that now that intent has been warped to benefit the commercial interests of corporations. Books, Kelly argues, should now become public domain shortly after publication for any derivative use you can imagine. On this issue, he wrote, in part:

But the 1976 law, and various revisions and
extensions that followed it, made it extremely difficult to move a work
into the public commons, where human creations naturally belong and
were originally intended to reside. As more intellectual property
became owned by corporations rather than by individuals, those
corporations successfully lobbied Congress to keep extending the
once-brief protection enabled by copyright in order to prevent works
from returning to the public domain. With constant nudging, Congress
moved the expiration date from 14 years to 28 to 42 and then to 56.

While
corporations and legislators were moving the goal posts back,
technology was accelerating forward. In Internet time, even 14 years is
a long time for a monopoly; a monopoly that lasts a human lifetime is
essentially an eternity. So when Congress voted in 1998 to extend copyright an additional 70 years
beyond the life span of a creator—to a point where it could not
possibly serve its original purpose as an incentive to keep that
creator working–it was obvious to all that copyright now existed
primarily to protect a threatened business model. And because Congress
at the same time tacked a 20-year extension onto all existing
copyrights, nothing–no published creative works of any type–will fall
out of protection and return to the public domain until 2019. Almost
everything created today will not return to the commons until the next
century. Thus the stream of shared material that anyone can improve
(think “A Thousand and One Nights” or “Amazing Grace” or “Beauty and
the Beast”) will largely dry up.

Sara Nelson, editor of Publishers Weekly, took exception to this and I agree with her views. She said, in part:

Such a suggestion, frankly, disavows the amount of work—the
amount of time!—it actually takes to create a book, not to mention the
lack of financial reward that comes, even in this era of inflated
advances, during that sometimes lifetime-long process. Why shouldn’t
generations of Joyces or Morrisons or, more pointedly, Richard Yateses,
benefit from the work that the authors scraped by to produce? Believing
that your book could become a source of enlightenment for generations
is a great thing, of course. Knowing that it might provide some comfort
for your own great-great-grandchildren ain’t such a bad incentive
either.

[…]Yes, it’s hard to keep track of copyright, especially when
publishers (who, essentially, "lease" copyright from the author)
disappear and morph and merge, as they do […] But as books become digital files that
require few warehouse fees, and the whole notion of "out of print"
becomes moot, copyright should be similarly simplified: it should rest
with the author, or his descendants, for way longer than they both
shall live.

Your thoughts?

Appreciating Failure

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Blogger Steve Thompson reviews my old book UNSOLD TV PILOTS, which is actually an abridgement of my two volume UNSOLD TELEVISION PILOTS 1955-1989. He  lists and describes some of his favorite flops collected in my book:

GOOD AGAINST EVIL-1977- the late Dack Rambo starred as a writer who
falls for…wait for it…Satan’s girlfriend, then teams up with an
exorcist to get her back, righting wrongs and solving crimes along
their way.
HIGH RISK-1976-Victor Buono, BATMAN’s King Tut and Joanna
(ISIS) Cameron as two of a group of circus performers who use their
skills to solve crimes.
ALIAS SHERLOCK HOLMES-1976- Larry (JR)
Hagman as a delusional motorcycle cop who thinks he’s the world’s
greatest detective and, with the help of his female psychiatrist,
conveniently named Dr. Watson, solves crimes.

Blow Job Empowerment

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Author Meg Cabot doesn’t understand why some girls think that giving blowjobs is empowering.

In “The Notebook Girls,” the allegedly
“real” notebook kept by four teens who attended Stuyvesant High School
in New York City, we are repeatedly told how “empowering” blow jobs
are…which left me wondering, as always, what’s so empowering about
giving sexual pleasure without receiving any in return?

It’s a question she tackles in her new book QUEEN OF BABBLE.

(That’s to Sarah for the heads-up…no pun intended).

Writing Blind

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Novelist John Connolly has an interesting post on researching his novels. But what intrigued me was this little nugget about how he writes:

I brought with me to the US the initial draft of The Unquiet.
I imagine it would be almost unintelligible to anyone who tried to read
it as a coherent narrative. My first draft tends to be a little rough.
There will be inconsistencies of dialogue and character. Some
characters will appear in the early stages only to disappear later,
their failure to manifest themselves once again left entirely
unexplained. Some things seem like good ideas at the start, but quickly
prove to be distractions from the main thrust of the book, and as soon
as that realisation hits me I tend to let those elements slide.

I don’t fret too much about how untidy the text may be (although,
in my darker moments, I wonder what might happen if I didn’t live to
finish the book and someone else, for whatever reason, decided to piece
together whatever was left behind. I wish them luck. I mean, I’ve
written it, and sometimes even I’m not entirely sure that I always look
forward to trying to put all of the pieces together). After all,
there’s nobody looking over my shoulder, and my main aim is to get the
plot and characters from A-Z, even if that means bypassing Q and R
entirely, and occasionally having to loop back to P just to reassure
myself that I have a vague notion of what I’m doing.

I’m guessing that John doesn’t write with an outline. I know a number of authors who write the same way he seems to…just going where ever the inspiration takes him.  I’m not going to knock it because clearly it’s worked great for him.  But I don’t think I could ever write that way. That doesn’t mean that I stick religiously to my outline, or that characters don’t come and go (I’ve had characters who were meant to die in Chapter One that I kept alive through the whole book), but I need it to keep me more or less pointed in the right direction. I would find writing a book, particularly a mystery, very difficult to do on-the-fly.

Has “Grey’s Anatomy” Jumped The Shark?

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I can usually ride along with the sillier aspects of GREY’S ANATOMY, much the same way I willingly suspend my disbelief and accept CSI techs getting DNA results back in 20 minutes, questioning witnesses, carrying guns, and driving chrome-plated Hummers.  But the season finale of GREY was just too much. 

An article in today’s LA Times analyzes the more outrageous aspects of the story.  Izzie, one of the regular characters, falls in love with Denny, a potential heart-transplant patient, and goes to outrageous lengths to make sure he receives a donor heart:

Izzie then deliberately cuts the pump lines of Denny’s heart’s left
ventricular-assisting device. Emergency cases get priority, and his
deteriorating condition will move him up the transplant list.  But Izzie’s disconnection of Denny’s assistance device (which initially
caused the heart to stop) ultimately leads to his kidney failure.  The other surgical interns learn what is happening, but they don’t report Izzie’s behavior to the supervising resident.

When
the truth comes out, the chief of surgery acknowledges that the
hospital’s accreditation may be in jeopardy, but he takes no action and
Izzie quits on her own. Because of his worsening heart failure, Denny receives the heart that was intended for the other recipient, but dies afterward.

All of this strained believability to the breaking point. Nobody was behaving in a realistic way in a realistic world…yet we aren’t being asked to believe it’s a fantasy world…we’re supposed to accept that it’s real. In other words, this isn’t James Bond, Harry Potter, or  the X-Men, where you know going in the rules of the real world simply don’t apply. The doctors in GREY are supposed to be real interns in a real hospital in the real world. But you’d never know watching the finale:

A prospective heart transplant patient would never sign a Do Not
Resuscitate order — surgeons would not operate on such a patient
because resuscitation may be necessary at any point. Second, if a heart assistance pump were disconnected, a loud alarm would sound.  Third,
interns could never monitor a sick heart patient for such a prolonged
period of time without intervention by at least a nurse, if not a more
senior physician. In the show, the interns watch Denny’s heart stop,
resuscitate him, give him emergency medication — all without
observation or intervention. In real life, such a stunt would be cause
for Izzie’s immediate arrest for attempted murder; the other interns
would likely be kicked out of the residency program.

The upshot, according to common sense and the LA Times:

In fact, the only truly believable scene is the correct use of
phenobarbital to put Dr. Meredith Grey’s dog to sleep because of
incurable bone cancer.

Back to the Future Vampire Fanfic

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Tales to Astonish has stumbled on some truly bizarro fanfic:

Does anyone else find Back to the Future fan fiction strange?

Would you find it stranger if all of the characters were vampires?

I would, but then again I write Matlock/Star Trek fanfic in my spare
time, where they’re all towering robots from a dark cybertronic
dimension.  Who am I to judge someone for having strange passions?

I couldn’t resist something as unbelievably inane as  "BACK TO THE FUTURE vampire fanfic"…so I had to take a look:

I’m Flaming Trails, the web-mistress.
You’ve probably guessed from the title of this web page that this isn’t your standard BTTF fan fiction fare. It isn’t.
I don’t generally write the more "normal" fan fiction. My areas of
expertise are vampire versions of Doc Brown; worlds that don’t contain
Clara, Jules, or Verne; intense angst; and humor stories that would
make poor Doc wake up screaming.

Me, I’m Flaming Entrails, and my area of expertise is writing "Desperate Housewives Time Travel Lesbian Porn" that would make poor Eva Langoria wake up screaming.

(Thanks to Andy for the heads-up!)