All Hail Sir Reginald Snobbington the Third

Okay, I’ve got a sure-fire formula that’s guaranteed to make you the most annoying guy (or gal) this weekend: after watching whatever movie you and your friends, your wife or your family wants to see, talk about why you hated it afterward. And don’t be general, make sure you go into all of the specific errors that the director made, and how you would have done it better. Be prepared for accusations of ruining the movie by over-analyzing it, and not enjoying it “for what it is”, be prepared to be labeled a snob.  You’ll be guaranteed to be hated by your loved ones, but you’ll also be guaranteed to be a bit better of an artist (that is, if you actually go out and try and create art afterward).

Hating other people’s art is an essential part of becoming a better artist. Sure, it’s a great idea to analyze art that you love, but honestly, you will learn the lessons much more saliently if you see what’s lacking.

Why is this so important?

Well, one way of looking at art is as a discussion. One artist creates a piece of work, and says, “Here, here is my understanding of what life, truth and beauty is all about.” And another artist comes along and says, “That’s a good start, but you’ve missed this little bit of life, truth and beauty over here.” And so it goes, on and on, for thousands of years.

Greeks look at sculpture, and say, “Hey this could look more like a real thing.’” and start making stuff that looks more real. The next group of Greeks say, “Wow, that looks real, but wouldn’t it be more exciting if they we’re putting their weight on one leg?” and then the next Greeks come along and say, “Wow, that contrapaso stuff is swell, but how about some more flowing drapery and dynamic poses?” and before you know it, three artistic movements just happened.

Hmmm, not bad.

Now, that's more like it!

That’s the thing about movements: they never happen in a vacuum. They’re always a response to the one that came before. You can only engage in the conversation if you know the language, and the language of art is critical analysis (aka talking like a snob).

What does analysis mean? It means, yes, picking things apart. Nitpicking, if you will. It means, first paying attention to how you feel, and second coming up with a good explanation for why you feel that way. Look at the details. Figure out how they work together. Break apart those details, and try and understand the finer details inside. Question the assumptions. Challenge the stuff that’s phoney.

“Wait,” you ask, “won’t it ruin the experience for me?” It might, but what is more important to you? Do you want to say something significant with your art? Do you want to illuminate a bit of truth or beauty, or do you want to be transported to the magical realm of Middle Earth?

Umm...Middle Earth.

And to be quite honest, analysis does not ruin art for me. It empowers me. Rather than having an artistic experience dictated to me, I have a say in what the experience will be. Rather than being told that explosions and Megan Fox are awesome, I can say, “Hmmm, I don’t think so.” And when a piece of art is really well made, I can decide to let myself really enjoy it.

Okay, I want to finish with one more little secret:  you don’t always have to open your mouth. If you’re always analyzing things, and ruining the party in the process, then you should probably just shut up. The job will get done just as well if you wait to do it with other snobs,  write it down in your hoity-toity theory blog, or scream it into a pillow. As long as you have a chance to figure it all out, and as long as you actually go out and make something in response, being an art snob can only make you a better artist.

Although I don’t have a good citation for it, Carl Dreyer is supposed to have said that the primary role of a director it to engage the audience. What does it mean to engage the audience? It means to give them something that makes them want sit on the edge of their seat and keep watching. Over the next several posts, I’d like to explore some of the ways a storyteller can do this. Personally, I believe the most fundamental way to engage the audience is to create mystery. So I thought it’d be the best place to start.

What is Mystery?

First of all, mysteries are not secrets. If you have some sort of information about your world or characters, and you give your audience no hint of those secrets, then they might as well not exist. To steal a title of a great C.S. Lewis short story, mystery is The Form of Things Unknown. What does this mean? It means you know a little bit. You have a clue, but the details are unclear. There is a form and a shape, but it’s hazy, dark and obscured by clouds. So to set up any mystery, you must show something. You must show enough to know that there’s more there.  What you choose to show must also be compelling. It can’t make sense on its own, and it should challenge the audience and make them uncomfortable.

This creates two great responses. First, if you see part of an image that doesn’t quite make sense, you want to see the rest.  Second, mystery inspires fear.  The hulking form in the dark corridor could be anything, and in your mind it becomes everything. It’s transcendent, terrifying and sublime.

J.J. Abrams has some interesting things to say about this:

Mystery as drama

Every good story poses a question. The answer to that question is the mystery that will keep your audience engaged. The more compelling the question, the more they’ll be glued to their seats.  The Usual Suspects is a naked example of this. The whole movie is built upon the question: Who is Keyser Soze? But you don’t have to pose such an enormous question – the question can be as simple as: Will Conan avenge his parents’ death? Will Frodo reach Mount Doom? It’s basically the question you pose in the inciting incident. The mystery can even be in the how, not necessarily in the end result. In the Godfather, it’s pretty clear that Michael Corleone is going to end up changing from a nice-guy to a mob boss, but the compelling question posed is: How?

Mystery in characters

I touched on this briefly last week in my post about epic characters. Mystery is great way to make a character compelling. What you don’t know about a character you fill in with infinite possibilities, or simply accept that it’s beyond human comprehension. The G-man in the Half Life series is a great example of a character who is compelling because of the mystery that shrouds him. Again, what you do know about him makes the mystery interesting. He’s a man in  a suit, who wanders effortlessly through a maze of dangers that you’ve been fighting tooth-and-nail to survive.

Mystery in the world

Using mystery is great way to make a world seem far more vast than you’ve actually thought out. By making references to small details in far flung corners of your world, you create a framework that your audience will assume is filled in as richly as the world you present in detail before them.

Keep it Mysterious

Lastly, you don’t have to give an answer to every mystery. One of the problems of creating a really compelling mystery, is that it’s often hard to deliver an answer that’s as powerful as the original mystery. J.J. Abrams is a master at using mystery to draw you in, but tends to get stuck trying to figure out where to go from there. Usual Suspects is one of the few stories that successfully figured out how to do this, but to make it work, Bryan Singer had to go BIG on the conclusion. As an alternative, Peter Weir’s Picnic at Hanging Rock is built around a compelling mystery that is never answered. And the power of the movie is wholly dependent on maintaining that mystery. You can do this with characters, worlds and plot points. Just be careful. Mystery creates tension, and if you choose not to answer the mystery, you must find another way to release the dramatic tension or plan on having your audience carry that tension with them after the story ends (which is not necessarily a bad thing).

What really happened at Hanging Rock?

There’s truth to old show biz adage: “Give ‘em what they want.” Just remember, once you give it away, there’s not much left to stick around for.  So, if you really want to hold on to your audience, give ‘em mystery first, then give ‘em what they want.

The other day I watched Tim Burton’s adaptation of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and while there was much I enjoyed about the film (particularly Deep Roy) something just didn’t sit well. Although the visuals were stunning, it didn’t have the same feeling of awe and mystery that the book had. I think there were a handful of reasons for this, but the thing that stood out to me most was this: Willy Wonka was too human.

This is an odd thing to complain about. Some of my favorite stories are about complex, dynamic and fallible characters. That’s one reason I’ve raved ad nauseam on this blog about The Song of Ice and Fire.  It’s also been the hallmark of the best television of the last several years. Lost, Battlestar Gallactica, Avatar TLAB and The Wire have all found success by populating their worlds with interesting, human characters.

So why didn’t I like Willy Wonka? It makes me want to look back at one of the first characters I ever fell in love with: Judge Dredd. He was perhaps the first comic book character I was exposed to and I’ve always been fascinated by him. He lives by a code of honor that never wavers. He has an iron will, and he is totally dedicated to upholding the law.

TMI

In time, I was fortunate enough to have had some really good English classes in high school, that laid the foundation for my love of critical analysis and story theory. One of the first principles I learned was the idea of a dynamic character. The idea was that a good character will grow and change during the course of a story. This is what is meant by a character arc. I also learned from Robert McKee that the most interesting characters are full of contradictions. This is a brilliant tool for telling stories because it allows you to create climactic and epiphanic moments from the changes and growth of characters.

But it presented a problem: Judge Dredd was not a dynamic character. Nor was he complex, or full of contradictions. He was static, unchanging and simple. And that’s what I loved about him. So what role does a character like Judge Dredd play in storytelling?

I love this guy!

The Epic Character

Later, in college I was introduced to Bertol Brecht. While I was never crazy about any of his plays, he had some theories on storytelling that made sense to me, and helped to solve my character quandary. Much of what Brecht wanted, had to do with erasing escapism; knocking down the fourth wall so that the audience had no illusions that what they were seeing was in any way real. Part of this meant creating characters that were archetypes. They were pulled right out of folktales. They were larger than life, symbolic and simple.

Discovering Tarkovsky gave me further insight into this idea. In Sculpting in Time he says this: “For me the most interesting characters are outwardly static,  but inwardly charged with energy by an overriding passion.”

Aha, Judge Dredd. So this is what makes an Epic character:

1. They are a symbolic representations of a specific part of the human experience

2. The are super-human

3. They are static

4. They are passionate in their simplicity

Judge Dredd fits this description perfectly. He is a symbol of justice. He has a super-human will power. He is completely unchanging, and he is passionate in his dedication to justice.There are many other characters that fit this model too: Superman, Batman, Obi Wan Kenobi and yes, Willy Wonka.

We Just Like ‘Em!

So why do we like these types of characters? First, their simplicity gives them power. They have no back story, and thus are charged with mystery. In addition, their simplicity means that the traits they do have are amplified. Think of Darth Vader’s unbending pursuit of Luke Skywalker in The Empire Strikes Back or the Terminator’s single minded destruction in The Terminator.  Second, they are ideals. They have the traits that we desire, and they are the people that we aspire to be. Last, they are easy to understand and judge. Their value is clear. We like Superman, because we know he is perfectly good.

"You've failed me for the last time..."

The Moral Question

While epic characters are powerful, they are also problematic. In past articles I’ve discussed the importance of empathy in storytelling, and one thing is clear: you don’t empathize with epic characters. They are also terrible models for how to think about other real human beings. In the real world these are called stereotypes and lead to bigotry, division and war. And yet we’ve created epic characters out of many real people: Ghandi, Hitler, Abraham Lincoln, Albert Einstein, Stalin and0 Picasso to name a few.

So there is a danger of using epic characters to understand real people, but they can play a worthwhile function in other ways, as long as we are conscious up-front that they are just characters. First, they play an important role in fiction in creating obstacles and foils for other characters.  Second, in our real lives they can serve as symbols for our own inner struggles and victories. We need not see them as models of the totality of human, but rather as representations of parts of our inner lives. Lastly, they are true to human psychology. We make epic characters out of real people, because that’s how real people see the world. Whether you want to make your audience aware of the shortcomings of this viewpoint is up to you.

Epic Characters Can Change

Ok, I know I just said that epic characters are static, but if you do decide to make them change, they can make for some of the most explosive moments in storytelling. To continue quoting for Tarkovsky: “In a non-developing state of tension, passions reach the highest possible pitch, and manifest themselves more vividly and convincingly than in a gradual process of change.” Primarily, this happens with villains, but it can happen with protagonists too. Think of Darth Vader grabbing the Emperor and tossing him down an exhaust shaft, or Javert throwing himself to his death after seeing his world of justice torn to pieces, or my favorite, Gandalf the Grey transforming into Gandalf the White on the peak of Zirakzigil. Because their character is epic, their transformations are equally immense.

Because of their simplicity, passion and mystery, epic characters make for some of the most enthralling characters in any narrative. And there’s no reason they can’t be a powerful part of a narrative that is otherwise full of rich, complex characters. While Lost is a great character drama, it’s primarily driven by the epic character of the island.  In the end, the best narratives are driven by point-of-view and epic characters embody an essential aspect of the human experience. If you want to tell a story with epic power, then make your characters epic.

As promised, this week we’ll be continuing our discussion on what makes a good action story. Last week we talked about the fundamentals: grounding the story, raising the stakes, and giving characters urgency. This week we’ll be talking a bit more about choice, as well as spectacle and slowing down.

Let’s start with choice:

5. Every Choice Has a Cost

There should be price to paid for every choice your characters make. Even the little choices. If a character has to move from point A to point B, show that it costs time and energy. If they have to lift something up, it takes effort. As the the story progresses make the choices more and more costly.

The Abyss is a great example of film that’s chock full of tough choices. From the beginning, there’s a price to be paid for every choice. When Bud tosses his wedding ring in the toilet, he has to retrieve it — staining his hand blue for the rest of the film. Later when Bud decides to try and stop Lt. Coffey, he must pay the price of holding his breath for an insane amount of time, while trying to swim to the Moon Pool, through near freezing water, to try and disarm a trained killer. By the end the costs get even bigger: Lindsey drowns and must be resuscitated; Bud has to dive to depths that are impossible for humans to survive in.

This gets to the heart of what makes a hero: they overcome obstacles.  That’s the whole point of an inciting incident. Make sure that for everything your characters do, they pay a price.

This is another fine mess you've gotten us into.

6. Complicate Action Through Choices

If you follow the previous suggestion, you should be okay on this. Choices are the best vehicle for raising the stakes. The best action stories begins with a choice that complicates things. This sets off a chain reaction that continues to escalate until a final resolution is reached.

There is the temptation to complicate the drama by throwing in challenges unrelated to choice.  Mission to Mars does this on several occasions. At one particular moment, a micro meteorite storm comes out of nowhere and punctures the hull, causing all sorts of emergency. It had nothing to do with the any choices the characters made, it was just a random bad thing that was chucked in to try and add drama.

In good action stories there may be moments that appear to be random, but pay close attention. Is it a random occurrence that happened as they were going about their regular business, or did the choices they make increase the risk of something bad happening? As I mentioned in the previous post, action stories are about choice and power. Complications are more meaningful when they are the direct result of a character’s choices.

7. Make Spectacle Matter

One of the great things I’ve learned from working in the game industry is the importance of using spectacle correctly. In gaming, visuals always support game-play. The character design should communicate what a player can expect from a character and spectacle should be used to emphasis a player’s status in the game. When a player does well, they get some sort of visual payoff. That could be a cool death animation of a bad-guy, a burst of confetti for solving a puzzle or breathtaking vista after passing through a difficult challenge. Spectacle can also be used in the same way to show danger, and failure. It’s all about enhancing the natural experience of game-play.

Spectacle can be used in the same way in action storytelling, but instead of supporting game-play it supports point of view. Use your biggest spectacle at the most important points of your story.  Kick off your inciting incident with a cool fight scene. Reveal your monster at the climax. Show all the new weapons right before you get ready for the final battle. Think about the point of view of the characters, what they are experiencing and how you can heighten that experience with the flashy details.

Victory!

8. Slow Down

This is the key to telling a really interesting action story. You don’t need to be going full bore the whole time. The slow moments create a contrast with the action moments, making the action more compelling. They also help build up to the action by creating anticipation, and mystery. As I mentioned in the previous article, the regrouping or planning moments are an essential part of the action film. If you were to ask anyone to name the most memorable moments of the A-Team, chances are they will choose the planning montages where the A-team welded together some awesome contraptions to use in the final battle. It creates anticipation for what’s to come, and it also creates a template for understanding the final action; you’ve explained the plan, so going into the final action there will be greater clarity about what’s going on, and extra drama when things don’t go according to plan (which always happens).

There is also something that happens when you just have non-stop action: you get sick of it. The explosions stop being so awesome, and the monsters get old. Take a break from the cool stuff for just a couple of minutes. Let your characters laugh a bit, or plan a bit. Then when you come back to the flashy stuff it’ll feel fresh again.

Please Don’t Be Stupid

At the end of the day, I want to be giving high-fives and pumping fists as much as any other fella when the credits roll. And it doesn’t take some sort of complex artistic back flips for a storyteller to do this, it just takes common sense. Take at least as much time to make the story understandable as you do designing the gears in Bumblebee’s elbow and you’ll be well on you way.

Really, it shouldn’t be that hard.

Action stories don’t get proper respect. In academic circles they’re sometimes treated as a step above pornography, and even among the groundlings, the assumption is that action should be crappy. Inevitably, I find myself in the situation where I’m the party pooper at the movies because I can’t just sit back and enjoy a “mindless action film”. I don’t enjoy it, so I try to figure out why I don’t enjoy it, and then I make the mistake of talking about it, and soon I’ve ruined the experience for everyone.

But there’s a reason I criticize bad action films: I think action can be good.

I’ll go a step further. Action stories are the most archetypal stories out there. Maybe they aren’t profound (although they can be) but when done correctly, good action resonates with us in the purest Campbellian* sense. At their core they are about a hero striking out to take control of a world in chaos. They are all about choice, power, conflict and victory.

* Joseph or Bruce

So I’ve spent many of my waking hours thinking about what makes a good action story. This post is an attempt to organize some of thoughts into a handful of concrete elements that I think get the job done. As always, there is a big component of creating art that is instinctive. My hope is that these elements reinforce that instinct, and can be helpful in solving problems.

So let’s get started:

1. Build from the Ground Up

Good action stories are grounded. This means establishing a world where there are believable threats and costs to your character’s actions. Brad Bird talks about this in the DVD commentary of Iron Giant. In the opening minutes, there is a scene where Hogarth is running through the forest. He inadvertently runs into a tree branch. The moment is shocking and violent, and a second later we see Hogarth get up and wipe blood from his nose. This moment is crucial in establishing that Hogarth lives in a world where people can get hurt. Establishing your setting is the best way to do this. Take time to show the dangers and costs of moving through the world.

Katsuhiro Otomo does this in Akira by setting his sci-fi story in a world based on naturalistic details. Technology isn’t all-powerful. There is trash in the streets, the schools are falling apart. There are holograms, but they look kitschy. Characters stub their toes, and their butts fall asleep when they sit too long. And of course, there is blood aplenty when things heat up. Then, when the really bizarre sci-fi stuff starts to happen, it feels much more terrifying. It’s part of the world, and lives by the same rules.  If a character can get a bloody nose from a punch in the face, you know that a genetically altered child, being kept at sub-zero temperatures in a massive subterranean compound is going to cause some serious damage when he gets free.

Try to imagine all life as you know it stopping instantaneously and every molecule in your body exploding at the speed of light.

2. Raise the Stakes

In order for the audience to care about the action, something has to be at stake. Either there is something to gain or something to lose. Good action stories start with compelling stakes and continue to complicate them. With each scene there is more to lose or more to gain. Good action stories tend to have really big stakes. Typically, all of humanity, or life, or existence is at risk. In Ghostbusters, crossing the streams risks all of reality blinking out of existence. In Terminator, it’s not just John Conner’s life that’s at stake, but the survival of humans against the robots. Make sure there is plenty at stake, and make sure to increase the load as the story continues.

3. Give Characters Urgency
In a good action story the good guys and bad guys alike wear t-shirts that say, “Git’r Done”. They know that the shortest distance between two points is a straight line, and they will follow that path with brutal efficiency. Nothing irks me more than action stories where villains delay achieving their objectives so the story can last longer. Think of the James Bond cliche where the villain explains his master plan before attempting to have Bond put to death in the most complicated way possible. It can also happen in smaller ways: villains gloating before they finish the act, or heroes trying to get one last answer before justice is served.

For a good example of what to do, look at Terminator and Terminator 2. The Terminators don’t care about asking questions or gloating over their kill, they just run straight at you and do their job. The moment that the T-1000 has John Conner in his sight, his gun is out of his holster and he is sprinting at him in that way that only liquid metal assassins run.

One of the benefits of giving your characters urgency is that it forces you to use action to counter action.

Thus:

4. Fight or Flight

If you give your characters urgency, they will either be running away from danger, struggling against opposition or chasing after an objective.  Fight-or-flight increases in proportion to the complication of the stakes. As the stakes are raised, characters spend more time in fight-or-flight mode. There is another type of moment that is not action oriented that is still totally appropriate, and even essential for action: the regrouping or planning scene. While it’s not high energy, it still plays an important role, but more on that later.

These first four elements establish a solid foundation to motivate a good action story. Next week will discuss more about the importance of choices and how to tune spectacle and breaks-in-action to the benefit of the story.

If you’re anything like me, an ideal work day would spent drawing monsters, robots and sexy babes-and then getting paid. There may a select few that are able to do this day-in and day-out, but the rest of us at one point or another are going to have to draw stuff that just isn’t our cup of tea. When you’ve got food to put on the table, most of us can slog through a boring job, but at best it’s not fun and at worst you’re wasting your time and not progressing artistically.

So what’s a monster-loving artist to do?

As I mentioned in a previous article being willing venture into uncomfortable areas can open up great opportunities for growth, and it all starts with:

Finding the Feeling

I remember watching a documentary on Raymond Kinstler a few years back where he suggested that artists should always paint with feeling.  When you’re drawing something fun, its easy to draw with feeling, but if your subject matter is not-so-awesome you have to put some work into finding the feeling.  Somewhere out there, there is another human being that is fascinated by what you find boring, so stop and ask yourself: If I was that guy, what would I find interesting about this subject? You may have to open yourself up to a wider range of emotions than you’re comfortable exploring. The feeling you find in a serene landscape will differ greatly from the feeling of a gritty urban setting, but both have something at their core that’s appealing. The key is to find what that is.

A couple of approaches can help with the search:

Use Reference

Consider this an addendum to Six Tips to Get Better at Drawing. Using reference will not only make your art better but it will open your eyes to the possibilities of  your subject matter. I like to collect a lot of reference before I start. Think of it as a search for awesomeness. Somewhere you’re going to find a couple of photos that open up an approach that is appealing to you.

What Would _____ Do?

Find an artist you admire that has tackled the same subject. If someone else has already solved the problem, why spend the time figuring it out yourself? Look at how they’ve made the subject interesting and try to take the same approach. A while back I had an assignment to do renderings of urban environments. Looking back at Otomo’s Akira opened up huge possibilities for how I could approach the pieces with feeling.

Take the Challenge

Perhaps the subject matter you are approaching isn’t actually boring, but it’s difficult; fear is masking itself with disinterest. I think this was the case for me with technical drawing, perspective and building design. It wasn’t until I was put in a situation where I had to face my fear that I realized it was fear I was avoiding and not boredom. Look at your subject matter and take it as a challenge. Maybe it’s something you haven’t tackled before, but I guarantee that you are more than suited to take on the challenge and come out victorious.

To finish I wanted  to refer to a line from Elizabeth Bennett Browing’s Aurora Leigh:

Earth’s crammed with heaven, And every common bush afire with God; But only he who sees, takes off his shoes – The rest sit round it and pluck blackberries.

There is something divine in any subject matter you approach, the key is to have the artistic faith to see its true nature. And really, do you want to spend one second of your life being miserable about drawing something? It’s not just your time that’s at stake but the passion for your chosen trade, and the last thing you want to be is an artist that hates being an artist.

Okay, stay with me here. I promise this contains some practical advice on being a better artist.

Have you ever read The Neverending Story? You’ve probably seen the movie, which is a watered down version of the first half of the book, and you might have seen the sequel which is a pathetic pastiche of the second half of the book. But the actual book is a surreal, frightening and epic fable with far more depth than either movie suggests. While a lot happens in the book, it’s basically about Bastian’s struggle with two devils. They manifest themselves in many of the challenges Bastian faces, but their most concrete forms are found in the werewolf, G’mork and the witch, Xayide. Each using unique and drastically different tactics to destroy Bastian.

While researching more info on the author of TNES, Michael Ende, I discovered his connection to a quasi-religious, philosophical school of thought called Anthroposophy .  One of its basic tenets is that there is a reality beyond what we can see with our regular senses that can only be accessed through spiritual insight and imagination. (Fantastica anyone?)

I don’t know enough about Anthroposophy to be more than curious about it, but some of the teachings of the founder, Rudolph Steiner, offer some valuable metaphors for life. I was particularly fascinated by the metaphor of Lucifer and Ahriman. From Wikipedia:

Lucifer and his counterpart Ahriman figure in anthroposophy as two polar, generally evil influences on world and human evolution. Steiner described both positive and negative aspects of both figures, however: Lucifer as the light spirit which “plays on human pride and offers the delusion of divinity”, but also motivates creativity and spirituality; Ahriman as the dark spirit which tempts human beings to “deny [their] link with divinity and to live entirely on the material plane“, but also stimulates intellectuality and technology. Both figures exert a negative effect on humanity when their influence becomes misplaced or one-sided, yet their influences are necessary for human freedom to unfold.^[1][3]

G’mork and Xayide are basically Ende’s embodiment of Ahriman and Lucifer respectively. G’mork seeks to destroy Fantastica and Bastian through despair, discouragement and self-hatred. One of the fascinating revelations in the book, that is never mentioned in the movie, is that the inhabitants of Fantastica aren’t destroyed by the Nothing, but are transported to the physical world where they become lies. G’mork seeks to deceive Bastian into believing that there is nothing but that which is in front of him, and it isn’t until Bastian takes the creative act of naming the Childlike Empress, that G’mork is truly conquered (although technically he dies earlier in the book).

Xayide, on the other hand tempts Bastian to use the limitless power of Auryn to make himself Emperor of Fantastica; to revel so much in his own creativity and greatness that he slowly destroys his own identity, and alienates all of his friends. It isn’t until Bastian gives up everything, including Fantastica, that he regains his true self.

So what does this have to do with art? Every artist is constantly under the influence of Ahriman and Lucifer, or if you prefer, G’mork and Xayide. The Art and Story Crew discussed this recently in The Big Ego episode of their podcast. Either an artist will never create anything because they lack faith in themselves, or spend their hours reveling in the aroma of their own flatulence because they’ve had a smidgeon of success.

True artistic salvation can only be found on the middle road. What religious types like to call “the straight and narrow”.  A true artist has to be like the warrior who knows that he can kill, but knows that he is also made of flesh and blood.

Now for the prescriptive stuff. So, you want to avoid falling off the straight and narrow into the hell of Lucifer and the hell of Ahriman, right? Here’s how you do it: Work.

Steven Pressfield describes how to do it here: Having a Practice

Pay particular attention to his point on the hierarchical orientation vs. the territorial orientation. You’ll find your satisfaction in the life at the drawing table, not at the complaint desk nor at the awards banquet. And if you ever find yourself slipping off the straight and narrow, thinking, “who am I to do this” or “they sure broke the mold when they made me” then shut up, sit down and get to work. Ahriman and Lucifer will still visit you, but they’ll be transformed. When the two forces are balanced they become muses, offering creativity and insight beyond what your lowly flesh was capable of before. In short, you’ll basically become the artist version of this:

It doesn’t take greatness to do this, it just takes the wisdom to clear away every other distraction in your life out the way and to get to work.

Every story, whether action, comedy, slice-of-life, or abstract will build tension and then release that tension at a certain point. That’s it.

You’ve probably seen a graph like this before:

from catchyourhare.com

That’s all you need to know about telling a story. So how do you build tension?

Start with a small event, followed by a bigger event, and finish with a really big event. Kung Fu Hustle is a great example of a very simple version of this structure. It’s nothing more than a series of fights and comic moments that get progressively bigger and more absurd as time progresses, until the final moment culminates with a decisive end of the escalation.

We're just getting started.

Don’t worry about inciting incidents, don’t worry about story beats, just start with a small event and follow it up with bigger events until you come to an event that finishes it all. This even works scene to scene too. Every little part of your story should follow the same pattern, as long as the resolutions to the little stories build toward the overall big story.

This even works for stories that are slow, minimalistic or sparse. It just happens much more subtly, and the climaxes are smaller (although not necessarily less powerful). Case in point is Ozu’s Late Spring. While the events are quotidian, they build toward a powerful tension that is released with the final subtle moments of the film. Paul Schrader’s Transcendental Style In Film is an in-depth description of how this works with “quieter” stories. While he refers to “codas” and “human density” he’s basically just describing the same process; build tension and then, release it.

The emotional climax of Late Spring.

Even a movie like Baraka, that isn’t even really a story, follows the same pattern. It’s a series of seemingly unrelated, but beautiful images from around that world that tie together thematically as the film progresses. The culmination is a collection of disturbing images of genocide and violence, interspersed with dark Japanese performance art, followed by a visual harmony that suggests a unification of all the images that have come before. While its quality is more musical than narrative, it still builds and releases.

The fun thing about telling stories is that there are a ton of ways that you can accomplish this, but you don’t need to over-think it! Just make sure the big pie fight is at the end of the movie and not at the beginning and you’re on your way.

Now, having said all this, I think there are some details about how to best do this, but they aren’t hard fast rules, and I can think of exceptions to almost every other element that I think makes a story good. Many of my favorite stories have dynamic characters, interesting turns and compelling stakes, but I have other favorites that do fine without.

But every story, somehow, has to build to something.

1. Draw a lot. How much is a lot? Malcom Gladwell says its takes about 10,000 hours of doing something to become an expert at it. (I recently did a back-of-the-napkin calculation with my father and we figured he had done over 80,000 hours of surgery!) So the more you do every day, the faster you’ll get good. In 2004, I attended my first San Diego Comic Con, where I nervously showed around my sketchbook to artists I admired. One of these artists was Paul Davies, who recommended that I fill up one sketchbook a month, at minimum. I did just that, several months over, and was amazed at how quickly I progressed over that time. I also recommend that if you have the means, to get a job where you draw. It’s much easier to get in a lot of hours of practice when 8 or more of them are guaranteed everyday.

This is your best friend

2. Slow and Steady. Especially when learning to do cleanup, whether it be with pencil, brush or crow quill, go slowly. It’s just like practicing a musical instrument. You start as slowly as you can without making mistakes, then you speed up. Go as slowly as necessary to have control over what you’re doing on the page. This is particularly important when trying to ink ellipses and other curves freehand. While it’s best to sketch an ellipse in a single quick stroke, I’ve never seen an artist I admire ink an ellipse that way. Most will carefully and deliberately chunk out the ellipse with smaller controlled ink strokes.

Watch how Jake Parker does it:

Inking Missile Mouse from jakeparker on Vimeo.

3. Learn from the best. Another musical analogy. I met a guy once who played the violin in high school. His music teacher gave him this piece of advice: If you want to be first chair, don’t set your sights on first chair, set your sights on the best violinists in the world. Particularly with the ubiquity of information on artists available on the internet, there’s no reason you can’t learn from the best. Find the artists you admire through google or twitter. Start a correspondence with them. Ask them questions. You’ll find many are generous and willing to help. Read what they have to say on their blogs, and watch their video tutorials. The recently launched ArtCast Network is a great place to do this. If you can’t get in touch with an artist you like, then copy their work. Download, or buy high resolution images of their art and practice making exact replicas. When I started learning how to ink, I would download hi-res images of Frank Cho’s art, convert it to blue-line, print it out on Bristol and ink over it trying to copy his line quality. The same can apply to any artist you want to replicate. Look at their art, study it closely and figure out how to replicate it. Just one caution: make sure and give the original artist credit if you show your studies to anyone else.

One of the Frank Cho images I would practice my inking on.

4. Fix it until it’s right. When working on a difficult piece, redraw it until you get it right. Especially if you’re starting out, I recommend using mechanical pencils with a good eraser. They erase easily, and you can re-work and readjust a drawing until you get it right. Set a high standard f0r yourself and work to achieve that with every piece. Look at your drawing in front of a mirror, or flip it around and hold it up to the light. Seeing it in reverse will reveal problems in the drawing. Don’t take this suggestion too far. If you’re really hitting a wall, abandon the drawing, or start over. It’s more important to draw a lot than get stuck on one drawing.

5. Study the Fundamentals. Study the best books and videos on perspective, construction, anatomy, rendering and color theory. I highly recommend the resources found at Gnomon Workshops (Some of the best stuff I found on Gnomon were tutorials by Feng Zhu and Scott Robertson on how to draw a straight line freehand.) Go to live figure drawing classes, weekly, if possible. Go to the zoo every week, or more, if you want to learn to draw animals. Ernest Norling’s Perspective Made Easy will teach you everything you need to know about perspective. Preston Blair’s Cartoon Animation is the best place to get started with construction.  I’m still really searching for is a good book on anatomy. I own several books on anatomy, but none that really satisfies me. If anyone has any recommendations, please contact me.

Buy this book.

6. Repeat until you die. This is probably the most important step. There’s always something new to learn. Thank God! One of the greatest joys of drawing is having those break-through moments that come from constantly challenging yourself. Keep at it. The fun is in the process, not in the prize.

I do this because I’m a curious guy, and I think curiosity and creativity are linked at the waist. Being fascinated and in awe with the world around you is the quickest way to fill up your creative tank and keep you in the mood to love new ideas as they bubble up from your subconscious.

We all start being curious. It’s thrilling watching my 9 month old daughter as she discovers everything. Every shoe, toy, cupboard and chunk of dirt is new. She’s filling her mind with a fire-hose and her neural network is clicking together like a giant Voltron made of millions of chrome and plastic robot-cats. We were all like that once.

But somewhere along the way, we start putting up barriers to curiosity. The fire-hose slows to a trickle and suddenly Voltron looks like an amputee. We’re left with going-with-the flow-and doing as we’re told.

So what are the barriers that keep us from filling our minds with new ideas, and how can we knock them down?

I think there are two big barriers that really keep us from exploring our world and being more creative.

Barrier 1: Judgment

Back to me posting on Twitter about tardigrades. What if I said to myself, “I shouldn’t be wasting my time looking up info on tardigrades, I need to focus on studying art.” That’s a barrier of judgment. There is an expectation about what is appropriate for us according to our social role.  As a result, doctors should only read about medicine, writers should only read about writing and football players cannot possibly enjoy ballet.

Everyone needs some sort of unstructured play-time where what you do has nothing to do with survival (i.e. paying the bills). While I’ve never been a fan of sports, or even much of an athlete, I started playing soccer with some of the guys at work about a year ago. It’s the highlight of my week, every week. It has absolutely nothing to do with my profession, and it gives me a chance to work my brain (and my body) in ways that I never get to with art.

Stuart Brown says it better than I can in his book Play. Play is about far more than winding-down and diversion. Healthy play can make us more creative and curious about life. And if we can find out how to incorporate play into our work, the results are explosive. The best artists I know, are the ones for whom every day is game. They love drawing, and they’ll do it until they’re blind and have carpel tunnel.

One of the great lessons about judgment I learned from Orson Scott Card’s Literary Boot-camp. Our first day of the workshop we had the assignment to go to a library or bookstore and find a book on a topic we had no interest in. I found myself looking at books on salt mining and medical fraud. At first they didn’t do much for me, but it didn’t take longer than a couple of minutes for me to be totally fascinated by what I was reading. The material from those two books eventually inspired the short story Coney Island that I wrote for the workshop, and eventually adapted into a short film. All I needed was that little push to get past my judgment about what I would or would not find interesting.

Which brings us to the next barrier, which is really four barriers tied into one, and probably the most important barrier for you to face and overcome:

Barrier 2: The Gut Feeling

So even if you can get past judgment and crack open a book that doesn’t interest you, you may find that the book is boring, weird, disturbing or scary and that becomes the end of it. You put it down and move on to something that is more your cup of tea. It makes sense. You’ve got a gut feeling that you don’t like it, and you probably want to make art that is like the stuff you like, so why waste your time?

Here’s why.

If you want to be creative person, and think up actual, original thoughts you have to move outside of your comfort zone. The boring/weird/disturbing/scary signposts are like the skulls and roasted armor that  litter the mouth of the dragon’s cave. They don’t lie. The experience ahead will be uncomfortable, but there’s also a pile of riches available for the knight that’s willing to pass through the fiery vale.

A brief example: In 1913 Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring premiered to crowd that quickly erupted into a riot. It was too dissonant, too dark and too savage. Yet, only years later it was hailed as a masterpiece and even made part of Disney’s Fantasia. What, at one time, was an unbearable piece of art had transformed into a musical classic. Why? Well, obviously it wasn’t the music that changed. So, it had to have been the brains of the listeners. After hearing something unsettling, their brains went to work and formed new connections that made sense of the disorder. Their brains grew to understand the music.  (The whole story is told brilliantly by WNYC’s RadioLab)

This may be going on in your head when you first experience something different.

If you haven’t watched a film by Miyazaki before, chances are you are going to think it’s pretty weird. Bizarre animals, weird magic and a total lack of narrative structure in some of his films. But if you keep watching his movies, they start being less weird, and you start to see the patterns and the logic in what he is doing, and suddenly you have a new way of looking at the world, and an expanded tool chest for solving your own artistic problems.

B/W/D/S experiences do the same to our brains. They are uncomfortable, but they physically change the structure of our brains. Neural connections form where there were previously none before, and suddenly we’re thinking thoughts that we’ve never had before.

Some of my most formative artistic experiences started with an unwanted feeling, and ended with me being a more enlightened artist. The first time I watched Akira I was disturbed, scared and weirded out, but I eventually learned to love Otomo’s grounding of fantastic elements in brutal naturalism. It’s a pillar of what I look for in any sci-fi or fantasy.

On the other extreme, Yasujiro Ozu’s Tokyo Story was so boring the first time I watched it, I fell asleep. But in its real-time pacing it captured something so true about family and life, that I’ve never seen it repeated in any other film.

Slowness and boringness in art can be one of the biggest barriers, but it can be extremely rewarding if you’re willing to take it on.

Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami has a great interview where he talks about slowness in art. This is one of my favorite lines: “Some films have made me doze off in the theater, but the same films have made me stay up at night, wake up thinking about them in the morning, and keep on thinking about them for weeks.”

You can watch the full interview here:

Did you get the part about how he was thinking for weeks? As artists, we should search for experiences that make us think – that force us to re-evaluate the world and make new connections. Cozying up with the familiar all the time will never open up those opportunities.

In the end, an artist needs to be creative. To be creative you have to fill your head with novel ideas and then stand back as they form original thoughts. If you’re hindering the process with judgment and impatience you stop the flow and seriously hinder your brain from making steps it needs to come up with that next brilliant idea.