In addition to McKee’s and Egri’s books, I have found one other book to be tremendously useful in creating believable, rich characters with strong motivations.

It’s the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, currently in its fifth edition.  Some call it the DSM for short.  The fourth edition is more punchy and more direct, and a lot of diagnosticians prefer the old to the new; but for a writer’s purposes the version doesn’t matter.

Open up this thick book to a random page, and you have a complete and fascinating description of character traits for a random character.  Let’s do that now: “Has deliberately engaged in fire setting with the intention of causing serious damage.”  How cool is that!  That’s a friggin’ one-hour crime drama right there, and the character is already mapped out for you on the page in loving detail.

Let’s go again.  “Preoccupation with one or more perceived defects or flaws in physical appearance that are not observable or appear slight to others.”  What, you can’t see my extra nose?  You can take that character trait and run a hundred different directions with it.

Oh, one more, please!  “Recurrent thoughts of death (not just fear of dying), recurrent suicidal ideation without a specific plan.”  In a sentence or two, you’ve established a protagonist and given him a problem that needs solving.  Neat, quick, and punchy.

The DSM works brilliantly as a rogues gallery, or as a source for richer and more complicated characters.  The DSM gives us believable, immediate problems for our characters to solve.

You could write for ten lifetimes and still not run out of story ideas if the DSM were your only source for characters.

Thank you.  Thank you, DSM 5.  I love you.

We’re experiencing a small outbreak of the measles here in California.  As of this writing, it’s only 100 or so cases, but measles are highly contagious.  It’s likely that a bunch more people will get sick.

In 1935, Muzafer Sherif conducted a series of experiments on the autokinetic effect.  If you’re placed in a dark room with only a single point of light at some distance, you will notice that that point of light seems to sway or diverge from its position over time.  Sherif placed individuals and small groups of people in rooms and asked them to tell him how far the light was moving.

Over time, groups of individuals modified their opinions after hearing other’s opinions.  One person says that the light is moving two inches, the other person says it is moving a foot; the first person changes his estimate so that the light is now moving four inches, and the second now changes his estimate accordingly.  The groups reached a group consensus on how far the light was moving.

The kicker, of course, is that the light wasn’t moving at all.  The people in the experiment were adjusting their own stated perceptions based on the opinions of others in the group.  This was one of the earliest experiments in social proofing.  Solomon Asch conducted some similar, fascinating experiments in the 1950s.

In college I took an infamous class called “Thinking about Thinking.”  In one lecture, Robert Nozick talked about a practical joke he played on an expectant mother who was of the crystal therapy set.

He said, “Sloppy thinking tends to congregate.  Where you find one bad idea, you’ll find others.  I was once speaking with this woman who lectured me at length on the healing power of crystal structures.  On a sudden whim, I told her that I was doing research that proved that a child’s personality was determined by the structure of mineral nearest the baby at the moment it was born.  Ergo, you have to make sure the right type of rock is present whenever a baby is born.  The woman didn’t question me.  She listened carefully and told me that the research was fascinating and that I should continue it.  She didn’t tell me, as was the case, that it was an utterly silly idea with no basis in fact.”

Now the Internet of infinite ideas has a dark side.  And it’s a dark side that is historically novel.

The Internet aggregates sloppy thinking.  And it does so at a magnitude impossible before its invention.

Facebook’s recently updated algorithm reinforces content that your friends have already liked.  It doesn’t matter whether the content is correct or not; it only matters whether the content is Liked and Shared.

Facebook is the rule, not the exception.  Regardless of whatever bizarre crackpot notion you might entertain, there are a hundred people on the Internet who have already started an online forum to discuss and support and social proof you in your weird assumptions.

Before the Internet, all your social proof had to come from local friends and family and neighbors.  People within earshot.  And so your chances of getting a diverging variety of proofing opinions was far higher.  But today, with the modern Internet, amateur groupthink replaces scientific consensus, and everyone with an open browser is a self-anointed expert.

Real experts address epidemics very differently than random people on the Internet.  John Snow’s chart suggests that the water supply near Broad Street in London was the source of  an 1854 cholera epidemic.  Jonas Salk’s 1952 polio vaccine was scientifically tested in the Francis field trials before it was made available to all schoolchildren.  And in 1983, Harald zur Hausen described the HPV viruses that can cause most cervical cancers.  His work paved the way for development of a vaccine.

I suggest that social proof of nonscientific principles predisposes a population to epidemics.  In other words, endemic misinformation is a necessary precondition for “eradicated” diseases to make a comeback.

The God of Abrahamic religions does not exist.  If God exists, then God is not of a human form.  I suppose that if penguins believed in God, then God would be in the form of a penguin.  We see God as a micromanager, a straw boss, a pissed-off feudal chieftain erasing the poor sinners from the earth like Clorox against cold viruses.

God, if She exists, doesn’t care about us.  Caring is a uniquely mammal emotion, and one evolved over the millennia to produce more mammals.  Fish, once they are hatched from eggs, have no use for their young.  A plecostomus will happily eat another plecostomus.

These are realizations in the process of being realized.

All God’s will, you know.  But God doesn’t have a will, or even a won’t; God is a mathematical abstraction like pi or e, but much less useful in the construction of MP3 players.  God won’t help you square a circle or figure out the frequencies present in a Lady Gaga song.  For that you gotta fall back on science.

As science grows, God shrinks; God is the collection of things we can’t explain by any other means.  How come the God-damn dishwasher keeps overflowing!  Well, that would be God’s fault.  God damned the dishwasher, you see, or else that Maytag would be running fine today.

It’s sad and scary, living a life without God present, in the same way I imagine it would be sad living without your parents.  God’s basically a surrogate for your dad and your mom, all rolled into one, the magical superparent looking out for your welfare at all times.  God is the Final Recourse, the one to complain to when no one else will listen.

Except of course, God doesn’t exist and therefore it’s only physics and your own capabilities of self-care.

God’s a complaint box stuffed to overflowing, letters and notes that will never be read, because there is no one there to read them.

We are all together, on our own.

Let us pray.

Telling a story good is hard.  Telling a good story is even harder.

You don’t grow up in the backwoods of West Virginia without being taught how to tell a story.  I remember my Uncle Masel regaling me at length about teaching junior high school class.  “And them kids in the back of the room would jest start talkin… and they’d get up and ornery… and I wouldn’t say a word, I’d jest open my little black book and next to thar names I’d jest wrat a little letters, I’d wrat D.M.”  And here he’d pause imperceptibly.

“Dahreaah of the mouth,” he’d say.  And the pause was always perfectly timed..

I read a lot of new material.  Now and then I judge the Orange County Playwright Association’s competitions.  I read a lot of new material for friends; I audition now and then for new plays and new movies; I listen to a lot of stories.

Most writers have script format down cold.  Most of them have nailed concepts of pace and tone, and many of them know how to create beautiful and compelling universes.  Many of them get produced and get their scripts made into films and plays.

What they don’t know how to do, almost to a one, is tell a story.  Telling a story is not something you can pick up at a tony conference, and it’s not something you can learn how to do by reading a book or two.  Almost anyone can tell whether a story or a song is good, but the ability to create compelling stories or songs is a gift bestowed upon the the very patient and the very industrious.

I hate my own work.  I retool it dozens, maybe hundreds, of times before it ever gets to a state where an audience might see it.  Every moment of a Byrd story has been milled over and retold and rethought and retooled until it resonates within the character of the entire piece.

One writer I know has written maybe a dozen full length plays in the time it’s taken me to write one.  In his case, he can’t get any of his shit produced.

That’s a problem, thankfully, I have never experienced yet.

Quality, quality, quality.  It all comes down to craft.  Are you willing to roundfile a thousand mediocre stories to find one perfect diamond?  Are you willing to retell and retell and retell a story, even before the first bit of dialogue ever hits the page?

Most writers are dreadfully, dreadfully lazy.

I have read far too many scripts of late where the payoff is the Reveal — the bit of story element that all the characters spend dancing and talking around —

He was really a robot all along!

He was really an alien all along!

He was really her father all along!

Sigh.

Failure to tell a story at a reasonable tempo does not constitute suspense.

What constitutes a great story really hasn’t changed very much over the years.  The best books I’ve read on the topic to date are Lajos Egri’s “The Art of Dramatic Writing” and Robert McKee’s “Story”.  Both books spend a considerable amount of time dissecting functional stories to figure out why they work.

I can think of no better use of one’s time as a writer than studying, and copying, the best of the best.

I believe strongly in emulating other successful storytellers and their processes.  The best professional storytelling today comes out of Pixar, which has a strongly collaborative writing process.  Every script out of Pixar has a dozen or so story artists working on the project.

It must be such a luxury having a dozen minds working together on a coherent set of story threads, trying to make sure that no pieces are left dangling, no bits of character are left over, that nothing is wasted, that every element resonates properly.

Story, dammit, story!

This web site has just received a facelift.  It’s now running on a WordPress core instead of the ancient Nucleus blogging platform, and it’s running CentOS 7 on an Amazon server somewhere in Oregon.  Migrating all the old data to an entirely new architecture was quite an experience in SQL and PHP hacking.  Webmin helped glue everything together.  Here’s hoping this new architecture lasts ten more years.

There once was a plodder named Euler
Who ruined a mathy potboiler:
Said ‘e, to the i
Multiplied by a pi
Comes to negative one; what a spoiler!