When To Hide and When To Reveal

So I did buy a HP laptop, with plenty of memory power that I probably don't need, and auxiliary ports all over the side that I have no idea what to plug into -- there are more unfilled holes in this thing than a convent full of nuns.

The good news is that I'm using it to drive me to write more. Every night I go down to the dining room (well, it's not really a dining room, it's just the part of the living room with the table on it that we actually never eat on, because we're always eating in front of the TV), turn the laptop on, and just do the screenwriting thing.

It feels good.

I've moved my still-untitled supernatural thriller back up the front burner, and I'm back to reworking the first act. So far, so good. The main thrust here is still on eliminating the whole early sequence that establishes the main character and her unique situation, and instead dropping right into the story, and letting the audience wonder what the hell is going on with this woman, as information slowly emerges in dribs and drabs.

On the plus side, it kicks the story off a lot faster; the backstory sequence wasn't bad, but it didn't kick ass, and it ate up 12 valuable can't-start-the-story-yet pages. As it is, from the info we learn along the way it's pretty easy to guess what happened, and the audience's imagination of these events may well be better than what I actually came up with.

So the whole sequence, and all of its characters that never turn up again, are now in the metaphorical dumpster, where hobos can shove it aside as they search for apple cores and pizza.

The downside, of course, is figuring out when to reveal stuff. When I'm critiquing other people's scripts, this is often an issue that comes up.

Too many people try to make too much a mystery early, so the audience doesn't have anything to ground themselves in. Unless you are telling a very specific kind of story, it's not good to have the audience confused and uneasy for that long.

I'm a big fan of making the audience fairly comfortable with a situation as it is unfolding; give them enough info so that they don't feel lost, or that you're just jerking them around by hiding things from them. Then layer in the reveals.

But still, the idea of giving your character some mystery, something that is learned along the way, has to be balanced with this.

So in my first pass at the first act, I cut the backstory bit, and then promptly drop a big speech into my character's mouth in which she tells another character the whole story.

Ugh. Particularly inappropriate for this character, who is really not very talkative early on here.

So now I'm writing deeper. Figuring out ways to bring the audience along into the story, to give them little aha moments where they can see my character going through something and learn about her backstory that way.

The great thing about showing and not telling is that it really emphasizes the need to make your story more dynamic. It's not about talking heads, it's about action revealing character, it's about trusting the audience to make the logical jumps and appreciate a story that exposes more layers as it goes on in interesting fashion, rather than just having characters contrivedly blurt out chunks of backstory exposition.

In theory I know all this stuff, but every tale is different, and it's nice to be able to wrestle with my own script and really being able to spot what's not working and what needs to be reworked.

And to always realize that there's a lot of other ways to tackle a sequence, and that you should play with as many different of these ways as possible, just to see what will happen. Because good enough ins't really good enough.

But no complaints so far about my laptop, which is a delight despite the fact that I still have no idea what it can do. But I'm going to figure it out.