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21.11: The Cold Open- Action · Writing Excuses

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  [SPEAKER_00]: This episode of Writing Excuses has been brought to you by our listeners, patrons and friends.
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  [SPEAKER_00]: If you would like to learn how to support this podcast, visit www.patrion.com slash writing excuses.
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  [SPEAKER_00]: Season 21, Episode 11.
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  [SPEAKER_03]: This is Writing Excuses, the cold open action.
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  [SPEAKER_01]: Tools not rules for writers, by writers.
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  [SPEAKER_03]: I'm Howard.
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  [SPEAKER_03]: I'm Darwin.
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  [SPEAKER_03]: I'm Aaron.
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  [SPEAKER_03]: And we're going to talk about starting your story with an action scene.
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  [SPEAKER_03]: There are lots and lots of good reasons to do this.
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  [SPEAKER_03]: My personal favorite is that a good action opening
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  [SPEAKER_03]: a good one for me demonstrates the competence of the character you want me to like and and now I'm on board.
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  [SPEAKER_03]: And one of the best examples of this, I think, is the Pierce Brosnan
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  [SPEAKER_03]: James Bond almost doesn't qualify as a cold open because it's not cold.
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  [SPEAKER_03]: We know it's we're watching the James Bond movie.
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  [SPEAKER_03]: We already know he's competent.
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  [SPEAKER_03]: But the reason for me that a cold open is so important, an action cold open can be so important is that
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  [SPEAKER_03]: I need you to tell me why this character has earned the ability to be awesome and a good action scene can do that.
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  [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
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  [SPEAKER_02]: I'm going to fulfill my role as the show's resident hater and talk about why action scenes is called opens are really hard to do that, right?
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  [SPEAKER_02]: Yep.
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  [SPEAKER_02]: I think there's this tendency to want to start in media rest is advice you always hear because
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  [SPEAKER_02]: You want to start with stakes.
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  [SPEAKER_02]: You want to start with something exciting.
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  [SPEAKER_02]: You want to start with something that's going to engage people.
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  [SPEAKER_02]: The problem is survival is not good stakes, right?
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  [SPEAKER_02]: right, if the character dies, then all these relationships fall apart, all these people will be incredibly sad.
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  [SPEAKER_02]: Like all of those things have so much more chewiness than my connection to the character continue to exist on the page or not.
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  [SPEAKER_02]: Right.
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  [SPEAKER_02]: And so that is compounded by us not knowing the character yet.
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  [SPEAKER_02]: Right.
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  [SPEAKER_02]: Part of why the James Bond thing works is we have a serialized
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  [SPEAKER_02]: we know who bond is, we want him to do these things, we want him to see the dismission, because we like him, and we know him, right?
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  [SPEAKER_02]: Or, you know, we have a relationship to whom whether you like it or not.
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  [SPEAKER_02]: And so I think when you are starting a book with a cold open, the biggest mistake I see or an action scene as a cold open, the biggest mistake I see over and over again is,
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  [SPEAKER_02]: thinking that, oh, this is a cool gunfight.
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  [SPEAKER_02]: That's all I need it to be, right?
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  [SPEAKER_02]: And instead, what you need to do is give me a reason to care about these characters, that goes beyond just the fact of they might die in this scene.
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  [SPEAKER_01]: I recently started reading a romance novel called It's Love Skate Relationship, I believe, and it's about I love like the simple descriptive title Just like tell me what we're engaging with, you know, I was thinking of Kpop Demon Hunter too, which is just like
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  [SPEAKER_02]: Here's the thing.
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  [SPEAKER_02]: Yes, what it is.
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  [SPEAKER_01]: This is what it is.
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  [SPEAKER_01]: But it is a story sort of a I was described to me as like a cutting edge if you know that old romantic comedy which also actually ends begins in an action scene in the beginning of the cutting edge the movie you begin with the two leads one who is a
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  [SPEAKER_01]: figure skater, pairs figure skater, and the other who's a hockey player, both doing their sport at top levels, and it cuts back and forth between them.
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  [SPEAKER_01]: And part of what they play with is the contrast between the two sports, which will then come to play when they become a pairs together.
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  [SPEAKER_01]: but in the beginning of this it really opened with them with one of the main characters in the middle of playing hockey and what was great about it is you get the small like things that you need to think about in a sport so you're getting a lot of micro attention like will i get past the puck
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  [SPEAKER_01]: will I get the thing, but there was a part where the main character looks up into the stands and like wonder their parents isn't there, even though they promised to be there.
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  [SPEAKER_01]: And though it was only a moment, it gives it really humanizes the person.
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  [SPEAKER_01]: You're like, this is why it's so important.
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  [SPEAKER_01]: And they look up again and they see the scouts that might send them to the college that they really want to go to.
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  [SPEAKER_01]: And putting those moments of humanity and allowed me to then really care
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  [SPEAKER_01]: because I'm already starting to care about them as a character within this action context.
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  [SPEAKER_02]: I would argue that there's three things that Cold Open really needs to do, right?
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  [SPEAKER_02]: One is a stylish voice, second is a stylish world building, and the third is a stylish character stakes, not just character, but one matters about this character, right?
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  [SPEAKER_02]: And so kind of what you're describing with cutting edge and then with this book is you get a sense of the world building, right?
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  [SPEAKER_02]: This is about skating, here the values, it's being good at this thing, all of that.
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  [SPEAKER_02]: There is the voice of it, which hopefully is coming through in the prose in a way that's really exciting.
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  [SPEAKER_02]: And then there is why do we care about this character then looking up in the stands and seeing that their parent is missing.
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  [SPEAKER_02]: You know, one of my favorite examples of an action called Open Pulling From Film.
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  [SPEAKER_02]: is the matrix, right?
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  [SPEAKER_02]: The matrix starts with this thing that is the most viby, the most voicy thing in the world, right?
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  [SPEAKER_02]: And especially in 1999, we had not seen anything like this.
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  [SPEAKER_02]: And it was just like mind blowingly like cool and interesting, it was such a strong aesthetic.
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  [SPEAKER_02]: It was such a strong, you know, world building component because it starts with this idea of like, a world searching for this thing and then you're getting this cool technology, both in terms of how they were filming it
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  [SPEAKER_02]: the cyber punky hackery story that's embedded within it, right?
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  [SPEAKER_02]: So we're getting that worldbuilding in that voice.
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  [SPEAKER_02]: The thing that movies can do that books can't do is show you a picture, though, right?
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  [SPEAKER_02]: So we actually don't have a lot of character stakes in that scene and a lot of film examples will have this problem where you won't have a lot of stakes because you can replace that
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  [SPEAKER_02]: with the audience looking at the scene and enjoying the physicality of the scene and building a relationship with the character based on how they look, right?
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  [SPEAKER_02]: We like Trinity because she's hot and cool, right?
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  [SPEAKER_02]: Like that is basically what they were relying on and it works, right?
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  [SPEAKER_02]: We like James Bond because he's swab and doing sick stuff, right?
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  [SPEAKER_02]: Like he's jumping out of an airplane.
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  [SPEAKER_02]: He's like shooting guys in an alleyway, right?
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  [SPEAKER_02]: I think those kind of things work as a cold open,
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  [SPEAKER_02]: being able to see the character builds that stakes in a different way.
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  [SPEAKER_02]: When you're doing a book called Open, you need to give us things to care about that character with, right?
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  [SPEAKER_02]: Like I think of six of Crows as an example, where you kind of start, it's not.
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  [SPEAKER_02]: necessarily an action scene, you're kind of like going through this like weird prison, but you're following this guard and then it devolves into action over the course of it, but because you learn so much about him in his interiority as we move through this space, by the time things are popping off at the end and spoiler for the prologue, by the time he dies at the end of that, it feels sad because he's encountered things that
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  [SPEAKER_02]: you know, scope of reality has ability to manage these challenges and we know enough about him that it hurts because we care about this guy and his relationship to the world.
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  [SPEAKER_01]: This explains a lot to me about what you just said in that I think when people are writing, sometimes when you're writing your action scene called Open, you're seeing like the James Bond gunfight, but your reader may not be seeing it in the exact same way.
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  [SPEAKER_01]: And as somebody who can't see things in my head, a lot of times those actions scenes can leave me a little cold because I cannot envision
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  [SPEAKER_01]: everything that's happening.
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  [SPEAKER_01]: So the details of how cool the gunfight are, I like a lot of times they just kind of run past me.
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  [SPEAKER_01]: And any emotional moment, a character moment I will seize on.
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  [SPEAKER_01]: But if it's, there's none of that and it's just, pal, pal, pal in a movie it works because I can't see it.
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  [SPEAKER_01]: But in a book, I find it sometimes hard to track or to know why I should, like why should I be tracking it, actually.
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  [SPEAKER_01]: And why should I be caring about it?
• 8:40
  [SPEAKER_03]: This comes back to a tool that we should all have ready access to in our toolboxes, and that is point of view.
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  [SPEAKER_03]: If you are doing your action-coloured open in strict first-person POV, then you don't have the ability to give us someone else's perspective on the
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  [SPEAKER_03]: we only get their opinion of what it is that they're doing, but we get very quickly embedded in their voice, which is awesome.
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  [SPEAKER_03]: By the same token, when we talk about movies, that's end comics, that's cinematic POV or cinematic third person, where we tend to follow as if it is a third person limited POV, but we're following
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  [SPEAKER_03]: via a camera that is looking over their shoulder.
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  [SPEAKER_03]: And so we will be looking at other people.
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  [SPEAKER_03]: Knowing that that is what movies do, can help you understand how to do it with prose.
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  [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, that's why what I would say for the action called open in prose,
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  [SPEAKER_02]: think of it as a vehicle for voice and world building.
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  [SPEAKER_02]: The thing that you're doing to pull us in is the so voicing and so interesting in introduce elements of your world in nuanced and complex ways.
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  [SPEAKER_02]: And then the last thing you're doing is giving a stick.
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  [SPEAKER_02]: Stakes are the failure point, but the hook is the voice in the world.
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  [SPEAKER_02]: right when you're doing that.
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  [SPEAKER_02]: It's why when we see an action called open, it's most frequently in isolation from your main story.
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  [SPEAKER_02]: And that is either my different perspective or a different place in time.
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  [SPEAKER_02]: I would love to dig into that more when we come back from our break though.
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  [SPEAKER_02]: Okay, before break I was talking about one of the things about a cold open that makes it a cold open I think is really important is actually kind of isolating it a little bit from the rest of your story, right?
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  [SPEAKER_02]: Either through perspective or through time as a flash forward or a flashback.
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  [SPEAKER_02]: Aaron, before we start recording you raised an interesting question which is what's the difference between a prologue and a cold open?
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  [SPEAKER_02]: Do you have thoughts on it?
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  [SPEAKER_01]: No, that's still a question.
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  [SPEAKER_01]: That's why I asked you.
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  [SPEAKER_01]: But I feel like a lot of pro-lots.
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  [SPEAKER_01]: Like some of the things that you're talking about, I often see in pro-logs, which is that they are a world-building delivery mechanism.
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  [SPEAKER_01]: And what they do is they, they're like, I need everyone to understand that the great Chebang is what got this entire thing started.
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  [SPEAKER_01]: And so I want to put you in the mindset of the person who was there, when the great Chebang happened, and then it kills them at the end.
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  [SPEAKER_01]: So we know we're not following them anymore.
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  [SPEAKER_01]: I feel like I see a lot of that sort of set up of world through action.
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  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
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  [SPEAKER_01]: And it's difficult, it's an interesting, I wonder if you feel like
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  [SPEAKER_01]: it how well it works because I wonder if the danger is number one that the people might not be excited about it, they might not be interested in the action, but number two, if they get really interested in the action and then you pull them to somewhere else in the story, are there going to be like, I wish I were further back or further forward than the actual time period that the story is that I'm now having to read.
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  [SPEAKER_02]: You really got a, and the, the challenge of it is you're almost doing two starts to your book right and that's the talent of a prologue general easy kind of got to start the book twice right and starting a book once is really hard now that said you give us two different tonal openings and that can be part of it right so your prologue can operate as here's one vibe and then this, your next opening that's the opening to like your actual plot is a different vibe but has to be interesting on its own terms so,
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  [SPEAKER_02]: So I'm thinking of Fonda Lee's Jade City, as an example this, has one of my favorite sort of action called Opens, which is you get these two idiots who are going into a restaurant to try and rob a guy of his Jade, right, and that soon gives us the world building and the stakes.
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  [SPEAKER_02]: We see what kind of world genuine is.
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  [SPEAKER_02]: We see the perspective of why Jade matters so much to these people, we get to see what
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  [SPEAKER_02]: surprise, the Robert doesn't go smoothly.
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  [SPEAKER_02]: And we get all this voice of the world and the characters and the vibes in the steaks of these two idiots trying to accomplish this thing, even though we know the idiots, right?
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  [SPEAKER_02]: And so we start with that specific image and that specific,
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  [SPEAKER_02]: element of like, oh, this world is so cool, these criminals are so fun.
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  [SPEAKER_02]: I want to spend more time here.
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  [SPEAKER_02]: We're getting this very like guy richy kind of opening in terms of like a crime story.
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  [SPEAKER_02]: And then when we jumped to chapter one, we're getting the perspective of the daughter whose name I'm blanking on right now.
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  [SPEAKER_02]: We're getting her perspective as somebody returning to the city.
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  [SPEAKER_02]: We get this perspective of like, oh, this particle child coming home and we get a sense of a different kind of story that we're
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  [SPEAKER_02]: So you can lose momentum by doing that, but because we also have a clear entry point to the story, you kind of both these two openings kind of work.
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  [SPEAKER_02]: One is a cheat in a certain way to get all the world building on the page without having to explain it through your main characters perspective, and then you can just enjoy spending time with the main character.
• 13:59
  [SPEAKER_03]: It's worth pointing out that
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  [SPEAKER_03]: the example that I led with, gold knight.
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  [SPEAKER_03]: Technically, I would say that's a prologue, because at the end of that scene when he flies away in the plane, we end that scene, and we do the James Bond music, and then it's ten years later.
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  [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.
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  [SPEAKER_03]: that feels very prologue to me, but it establishes what kind of world we're living in and it establishes, you know, who are final villain will be.
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  [SPEAKER_03]: Spoiler alert, Sean Bean.
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  [SPEAKER_01]: Well, that's that movie room.
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  [SPEAKER_03]: Also, that's a movie from the movie of the movie in which he dies.
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  [SPEAKER_03]: I want to bounce back to the to the matrix really quick and and draw a metaphor here.
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  [SPEAKER_03]: The Wachowski's invented the bullet time photography rig, which was essentially looping you know a set of
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  [SPEAKER_03]: 100 cameras or something around the action so that you could fire them all off at once and create a 3D rotation on film in the pre-digital pre-CG days.
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  [SPEAKER_03]: They leveraged that, they leveraged that technology.
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  [SPEAKER_03]: in their opening scene.
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  [SPEAKER_03]: They didn't save it for something later.
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  [SPEAKER_03]: What is this?
• 15:27
  [SPEAKER_03]: Well, it is an establishment of voice.
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  [SPEAKER_03]: This is a coolness, this is a visual, but it is a cool thing that's gonna happen again.
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  [SPEAKER_03]: And so when you are writing your action cold open, if there is some cool technique, whether it is,
• 15:48
  [SPEAKER_03]: You know, using brackets to describe the way aliens yell or whatever, don't be afraid to use it in that opening action scene because you are communicating to the reader that this is a thing that can happen again later.
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  [SPEAKER_03]: And if you do it well enough, like the matrix did it well enough with the Trinity fight, we're hungry for it to happen again.
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  [SPEAKER_03]: and you get what is to my mind, the big win, which is I keep turning pages because I want to read something like that from you again.
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  [SPEAKER_01]: I also say it's interesting because it creates, I'm always interested in when stories are creating a different journey for the reader than they are the characters.
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  [SPEAKER_01]: And so if you're telling the reader, wow, there's this really cool thing that could happen in the world.
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  [SPEAKER_01]: A lot of times in fantasy prologues,
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  [SPEAKER_01]: or cold opens, you'll see like the use of a really extreme version of a magic or a technology often a mistake, ruins everything, and then you'll be go forward and it's like people rediscovering that magic or trying to figure it out, but in the, and they don't know, they're like, oh, I'm just trying this new thing, but in the mind of the reader, they're like, I know what this could do.
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  [SPEAKER_01]: both positively and negatively.
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  [SPEAKER_01]: And so it's like you're waiting for the other shooter drop the entire time, which is a really fun way of creating tension in a reader, even in a low stakes time for the character when they're just playing around because you know that like Hiroshima happens in three days.
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  [SPEAKER_01]: So this lovely like meal that everybody has happened in, you know, is happening around their table.
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  [SPEAKER_01]: Isn't just a meal, it's one of the last meals, or it's leading to something kind of clasping.
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  [SPEAKER_02]: Well, the matrix again has a great example of this.
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  [SPEAKER_02]: We see Trinity do the cool bullet time jump, and then the rest of the movie is when does Neo get to do that?
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  [SPEAKER_02]: How is he going to go on his heroes journey to call back to, you know, an episode of Wildback, but how is he going to get to the point where he is able to do the thing that she does?
• 17:53
  [SPEAKER_02]: And so we get sort of this magic system moment early on of like here's how she can break the reality while inside the matrix and then he's going to build his way up to doing that right so we get that tease of the possibility, but also, you know,
• 18:08
  [SPEAKER_02]: So it is how you're absolutely right where the matrix is a primarily voice-forward opening, right?
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  [SPEAKER_02]: And if you think about all the cinematic tools being put on display, they are from the technology to the costume design, to that horrible green palette that everything has is this idea of like they're using voice to pull us in, right?
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  [SPEAKER_02]: And so I'm going to disrupt the idea of this episode a little bit at the end here, which is
• 18:34
  [SPEAKER_02]: Think less about whether or not you're starting with an action scene and think more about what tool you're deploying to pull readers in right so I think action openings are often voice openings and I think that that matrix opening has
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  [SPEAKER_02]: more in common with, for example, the start of the movie Alien, which again is establishing a voice establishing an aesthetic and a technology and pulls you into this incredibly slow pan through the ship.
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  [SPEAKER_02]: As it shows you the soundscape, it shows you the slowness of things, it shows you the way the technology looks and feels in this movie, which is going to matter a lot
• 19:18
  [SPEAKER_03]: I want to enumerate some things, I kind of summarize a little bit.
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  [SPEAKER_03]: Don't want early on, you ticked off three elements that you wanted an opening to do.
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  [SPEAKER_03]: You wanted...
• 19:31
  [SPEAKER_03]: It was a voice, world building, world building, and stakes.
• 19:34
  [SPEAKER_03]: Aaron, you mentioned tension as something you want the reader to feel, and I've said, I want the reader to like the character.
• 19:47
  [SPEAKER_03]: I see these as parallel categories.
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  [SPEAKER_03]: There is the informational category.
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  [SPEAKER_03]: I'm giving you information about voice about world, about character stakes.
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  [SPEAKER_03]: And there is the reader reaction, emotional category of, I like the character, you are making me tense.
• 20:03
  [SPEAKER_03]: you are, and I'm going to add one just because I want to have three, you are making me interested enough to keep turning the pages.
• 20:09
  [SPEAKER_03]: As you are crafting your openings,
• 20:13
  [SPEAKER_03]: you need to be thinking about doing all of those jobs with your words.
• 20:18
  [SPEAKER_03]: And that's the part that's so tricky.
• 20:19
  [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.
• 20:20
  [SPEAKER_02]: And just to explain the thing, for me, stakes is tension.
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  [SPEAKER_02]: They're the same thing in my mind.
• 20:26
  [SPEAKER_02]: Character stakes is what introduces the maintains tension.
• 20:29
  [SPEAKER_02]: And that is also tied up with how you feel about the characters and who's liking them.
• 20:32
  [SPEAKER_02]: So I think we're all agreeing and kind of saying, so maybe I just wanted to be clear about that.
• 20:36
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, and I just wanted to say that something that I found is that in working with students who are really used to visual medium, they're used to playing games and used to watching things is that a lot of that work is happening in ways that are not explicit so the thing that's explicit on the screen is the action like this guy shot that guy in the face, you know that is a thing that we know happened.
• 20:59
  [SPEAKER_01]: but the like I liked this guy because like after his first three attempts to like shoot the guy didn't work he found another way to do it with like a stapler and like wow that was really ingenious made him feel made him seem really competent made me like him
• 21:15
  [SPEAKER_01]: I understand the stakes because, you know, all these different things that we're talking about.
• 21:19
  [SPEAKER_01]: And so something I would challenge people to do is when you're looking in action scenes, if you're patterning a written one after something that's visual, actually go through and look at
• 21:31
  [SPEAKER_01]: an action scene and write down all the things that are happening in you, the things that you are thinking, the things that you are doing to fill in the gaps between the actions because those are the things that you're going to have to put on the page that the cinematographer and the actors and the music do when you're in a visual form.
• 21:52
  [SPEAKER_03]: And I would just like to lean in and say,
• 21:59
  [SPEAKER_03]: Like literally, just very, very, very words for words.
• 22:02
  [SPEAKER_03]: Very, very, very word for words.
• 22:04
  [SPEAKER_03]: Okay, and so, fair listener, I'm sorry.
• 22:06
  [SPEAKER_03]: I'm just gonna repeat what Aaron said in my own words.
• 22:10
  [SPEAKER_03]: It's homework time, okay?
• 22:12
  [SPEAKER_03]: Take.
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  [SPEAKER_03]: take an action-cold open from a movie and sit down and write the things that are happening in it in terms of world-building, in terms of setting stakes, in terms of defining characters, in terms of how it makes you feel in a with regard to tension, with regard to liking the
• 22:42
  [SPEAKER_03]: attempt to write a version of that scene that does those same things using words.
• 22:52
  [SPEAKER_02]: This has been writing excuses.
• 22:54
  [SPEAKER_02]: You're out of excuses.
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• 22:58
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• 23:02
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• 23:07
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