Writing

Let’s Write That CRAP

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(This column is posted at www.StevenSavage.com, Steve’s Tumblr, and Pillowfort.  Find out more at my newsletter, and all my social media at my linktr.ee)

Serdar and I often discuss the way writing is improved by drawing on anything but writing.  I’d like to share a recent insight I had regarding using graphic design and writing.

Graphic arts are a hobby of mine – and vital for my writing career so I can make the kind of covers I want.  I’ve been putting more time into my skills because they are fun, because of my writing, and because it’s also useful in my career.  One of the best sources is The Non-Designer’s Design Book by creator Robin Williams, which I returned to as a refresher.

Williams sums up good design in the enjoyably shameless CRAP acronym.  Anything from book covers to business cards has four traits – Contrast, Repetition, Alignment, and Proximity.  These traits of good visual design made me wonder – do they apply to good writing?

Let’s explore.

Contrast:

Good graphic design means that there are stark differences that stand out.  The similar should be similar, and the different should be very different.

When it comes to writing, contrast is very important.  Fiction requires us to know the differences among characters, places, and things – in fact to feel them viscerally.  Non-fiction needs to be bundled up in a way where you get distinct information – a muddle isn’t going to let you find what you need.

A surprising amount of writing is making sure things aren’t the same.  Like, say, these sections . . .

Repetition:

Good visual elements – colors, shapes, and so on – have to repeat in graphic design.  A book cover should have the same fonts for different text (unless you’re using that for contrast).  A good logo might use lines of the same thickness.

Writing also requires repetition.  Fiction requires restating certain things so the reader “gets” them – like a character’s personal habits or traits.  Non-fiction can require everything from similarly formatted timelines to repetitive elements like exercises or summaries of each chapter.  Examine your own writing, and you might find some things you think of as repeating aren’t boring, but are a good idea.

Writing is repetitious.  Hey, notice how these sections are also repeating a format . . .

Alignment:

Good graphic design has elements that align with other elements, giving them a kind of connection.  Business cards don’t place text willy-nilly, but are carefully aligned with each other for ease of reading.  Take a look at good movie posters and notice how titles, taglines, cast information, etc. usually have alignment that makes them visually pleasing.

First, let’s talk fiction writing.  Good plotlines need to have elements aligned so you can tell a story, and many fiction stories have a kind of symmetry.  Some authors carefully size chapters and scenes so they’re about the right size to keep pace and keep reader interest.  I’m sure if you write fiction you know that sensation of seeing it in your head – and a good story has alignment of many elements.

In non-fiction, writing also requires alignment.  You have to put information in the right order of a chapter so people learn the right lessons.  Chapters need to align, going in the right order to lead people through what you want to teach them.  These alignments may also repeat, as our friend repetition appears.

You’ll see this post has (mostly) aligned sections.  This one went a bit longer, but let’s call that Contrast . . .

Proximity:

The CRAP acronym’s final lesson is Proximity, a simple but oft forgot lesson of good design – related elements should be close together.  A business card probably has a person’s title right under their name.  A book with many authors probably lists the author’s names together as, well, they’re the authors.  Proximity says “this is related.”

Of course in writing proximity matters as you usually put related stuff next to each other.  A plot has scenes happen in a kind of order – even if you’re pulling a Rashomon and people have to guess the order themselves.  Non-fiction obviously groups similar things as that’s how you inform people.  As a writer, you’re probably using Proximity without even thinking about it.

And we see proximity here, in, of course, these sections along with opening and closing.

Looking back on that fun little analysis, I think it was a worthwhile metaphor to explore.  Taking CRAP and seeing what it might tell us about writing helped me think about both design and writing.  All from picking up a book from my past to refresh some lessons.

So what kind of metaphors are in your life that might help your writing?  Let me challenge you to find one and write about it – and share it with me.

Steven Savage

Trope Friction

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(This column is posted at www.StevenSavage.com, Steve’s Tumblr, and Pillowfort.  Find out more at my newsletter, and all my social media at my linktr.ee)

I was discussing tropes in a meeting of my fellow writers, and a thought came to mind.  Often when we writers discuss tropes it’s do we use them or not.  I realized that sometimes the value of the trope is something to bump up against.

Let me give an example.

In my Avenoth series, there is a sorceress, Marigold Rel-Domau.  Marigold is not your typical weedy magic user, she’s a 6’7” spell-flinger who works out and is willing to mix fisticuffs and sorcery.  The trope of the non-physical magic user was one I enjoyed running up against.  I thought about how using magic doesn’t give any reason not to engage in physical improvement and gives many reasons to hit the weight room.

In my thinking, her career involved troubleshooting dangerous occult and high-tech situations with her partner.  Marigold wielded gravity and kinetic magic, but being practical, she knew she needed more than one tool in her toolbox.  Sometimes punching someone is easier.  Sometimes it’s easier to break something with your hands than to try to leverage a spell.  She also had never gotten flying down so running proved to be a very important thing to perfect.

It could have been just a joke, but by the time I was done, I added to the world and the character.  Marigold, a constant planner in the vein of, well, me, would think that way.  So much came out of taking a trope and utterly inverting it.

Bouncing off the trope sent me higher – as well as leading to a wonderful metaphorical arc in the second book.

But the contrast is something that can draw a reader in.  At first, it may seem to be humorous in breaking a trope – a lot of humor is a kind of inversion or violation.  But the reason something doesn’t fit tropes gives you something to work on, turns the contrast into character, and makes the tale deeper.

Friction can slow things down – but it can also light a match and set ideas on fire.

Tropes may be fun to explore and deconstruct, and that’s a subject writers go on about at length.  But I think we as writers should spend some time looking at how we can use a trope by running up against it.  The friction of expectations can create sparks of inspiration in the author – and fascination in the reader.

So what trope are you sick of, and what appears when you break it open . . .

Steven Savage

Dungeons and Marios: Honor Among Brothers

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(This column is posted at www.StevenSavage.com, Steve’s Tumblr, and Pillowfort.  Find out more at my newsletter, and all my social media at my linktr.ee)

I consider the films Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves and the Super Mario Brothers movie to be successes as good films. I found them both enjoyable, but also find that both of them work because the people behind them made similar choices.  There’s a lot of lessons there, and you know me, I’m definitely going to write it down.

Let me pause to note I do not consider them to be of equal quality.  The Dungeons and Dragons movie is fun, emotionally resonant, and both grand yet very human.  The Super Mario Brothers film is a fun romp with some clever choices, but not as deep.  But the lessons – even where they both don’t succeed – are illustrative.

So how did two different films do same things, let’s take a look.  There are of course spoilers here, so here there be dragons (or Koopas).

Be Fun and Entertaining

Both movies are actually fun.  There’s action, there’s jokes, there’s actors and actresses giving it their all.  I had a good time at both.  Super Mario Brothers was so snappy and tight I didn’t even take a break.

Fun can be forgotten, especially when you already have other things on your mind like adaption.  But you have to give people a reason to pay attention beyond “hey I adapted this.”  Be it Chris Pine being a charisma bomb or a brain-twisting Mario scene where the infamous Rainbow Road is realized, give people a reason to enjoy it.

You can also tell people enjoyed making them, both have a joy to them.  Which probably says a lot about why they work as well.

Don’t Run Away From What You Are

The Dungeons and Dragons film is just like the games – not the books.  A group of confused dumbasses get into trouble and save the day.  It feels like a gaming session, right down to bad luck and unwise choices.

The Super Mario Brothers movie is colorful, bright, and strange. There are moments it has homages to the games and gameplay, but outside of those it runs on a kind of game logic.  It feels like a game and doesn’t apologize at all.

This is what people came for.  I do not come wanting an explanation of Mordenkainen’s magic or how to use a Fire Flower.  I want to see hypercompetent stupidity and someone yelling “wahoo” he stomps on evil turtles.  And I got it.

Use It But Don’t Overexplain

Dungeons and Dragons brings decades of history, rules, rules changes, rules arguments, novels, adaptions, and more.  What do you do with that?  Well, it’s raw material but you tell a story first – ten minutes of rules are boring but the sorcerer Simon struggling to “attune” to a magical item is interesting because it’s about a person.

Meanwhile the Mario film inherits a disjointed series of games and events without an exact timeline or even consistency.  The film takes a pile of stuff and forges it into a setting but also doesn’t explain it much.  Power ups just exist – what matters is how you use them.  An industro-solarpunk kingdom of apes just exist – what matters is if you can make them allies.  Tell a story – besides people already bought into the premise of plumbers teleported to this cartoony realm anyway.

The stuff you adapt is fuel for an actual story.

Get A Cast That Works

Want a good adaption?  Get a cast that will embrace the roles and bring things to life so people feel and enjoy the film.  Even the best script is nothing without the right cast.

Dungeons and Dragons cast is stellar.  It’s like a movie filled with leads that just happens to center on Chris Pine’s bard, Edgin.  From the humor to the pathos, the cast brings you into the film.  A few characters might have been used better or given more depth, but everyone used what they got and then some.

Super Mario mostly does the same thing.  Jack Black owns his role as Bowser and brings pathos to the character (more later).  Anya Taylor-Joys Princess Peach is fantastic, badass, and charming enough she’s sort of the main character at times.  Charlie Day is terribly underused as Luigi, but clearly brought is A game.  I could compliment others, but you get the idea.  The film is inherently ridiculous but the cast is game, as it were.

Now Chris Pratt is the elephant in the room.  Regarding his problematic statements, I looked into them for this article, and it appears he’s not bigoted, but is not always thoughtful or good at reading a situation.  Regarding his acting, he can “phone it in” but can really shine when he sinks his teeth into a role.

That being said, his Mairo performance was extremely generic.  It was enough to move things along and make Mario human, but he didn’t add anything to the role.  Whether it’s his fault or the scriptwriters, I’m not sure.  I also noticed the animators did some amazing expression work with Bowser and Peach and wondered if they were more restrained with Mario.

Either way, lesson learned – get a cast that’s good and let them go.

Give Us Real Emotional Arcs

The Dungeons and Dragons movie brought tears to my eyes, once during That Scene at the end (if you saw it, you know), and once afterwards when I realized how I related to a character’s speech.  The movie has multiple emotional arcs that bring it to life, give characters reasons to do things, and help you connect.

This is not consistent among the cast or characters, and I blame the script.  It’s a perfectly fine script, but a few more scenes could have done wonders.  But what is there is good.

Believe it or not Super Mario Brothers does this too, multiple times.  In fact, there’s a scene where Mario and his original nemesis Donkey Kong find out they’re a lot alike.  When a cartoon plumber and a big monkey share parallel emotions, you’ve done something right.

However Super Mario Brothers also doesn’t dive into the emotional arcs as well as Dungeons and Dragons and is poorer for it.  There’s some unused potential, from Mario feeling defensive about Luigi to Princess Peach’s isolation as a lone human in her world.  There’s unexplored character motivations, such as Toad’s heroic drive that differentiates him from his fellows.  I feel there’s 5-10 minutes of cut footage that made it a better movie.

But the lessons stay the same.  In fact  . . .

Give Us Relatable Villains

Hugh Grant, playing con-man Forge  charms his way through the Dungeons and Dragons movie in a way only he could.  Daisy Head’s creepy sorceress Sofina is something out of a horror film, and you believe she’d like nothing more to murder the idiots surrounding her.  Both get scenes that aren’t just villainy but humanity – Forge finds a joy in adoptive fatherhood, and Sofina snaps over how annoying Forge is in a relatable way.

This is great, they’re enjoyable.  They get human moments – but only the acting covers the fact they’re otherwise paper-thin characters.  Both could have shown more depth with just a few tweaks or an extra scene or two.  The actors clearly work with what they have, but there could have been more.


Meanwhile let me commit blasphemy – Jack Black’s Bowser in Super Mario not only gets to be relatable, his character is better handled than the villains in Dungeons and Dragons.

Yes I went there.

Black’s Bowser is a terrifying warlord and a hopeless romantic.  Madly in love with Princess Peach, he hopes to impress her and marry her instead of conquering her kingdom (sort of).  Throw in Black’s performance with excellent animation, and Bowser becomes sympathetic, a kind of ridiculously Shakespearean character of extremes.  If anything, I felt there was more to explore.

Both films add villains with some understandable traits.  Super Mario does it better.  Forge and Sofina aren’t interesting enough on their own, but Black’s Bowser feels like he could carry an entire film.

Do A Film Not A Preview

As I’ve said before, I will compliment the Marvel movies on sheer competency. However, I’m also extremely tired that the interlinked nature of stories seems to “wash out” the films.  There’s that need to keep the mega-franchise going, and there’s a certain “safety” in choices that wears thin.  Make something that stands on its own – like these films!

Dungeons and Dragons and Super Mario Brothers are delightfully standalone.  They do their job, they deliver.  Sure you may care due to the games – in fact it’s the only reason to care about Super Mario Brothers.  But both stand on their own quite well and in a satisfying manner.

There’s just that thrill of being able to “close the book” and move on with each.  Both deserve sequels of some kind, but its nice to see them deliver and be done.  It helps the people making them focus, and it means each film is reliably complete.

In Conclusion

So there you have it.  Both of these adaptions based on games, both wildly different, really succeed due to the same choices.  Embrace what you do, don’t overexplain, get the right cast and real emotional arcs we feel.  That’s it.

It feels unnecessary to explain this, but maybe the fact I feel this says volumes about the poor media I’ve seen – and how I enjoyed these two pieces.  Let’s learn from them, and maybe apply these lessons to things beyond giant big budget movies.

Steven Savage