...started a few nights back. I had a rare hour or two on my
own and a half bottle of wine. The Walking Dead – my go-to entertainment if it’s
late and I’m alone – is losing its appeal a bit. Season One started with a rush
of promise but Shane took the vibrancy and energy with him when he shuffled
offstage and The Governor’s no kind of replacement.
No, the early stages of this particular story were the best,
I’m thinking.
That’s where #firsttwentyminutes started – me thinking about
early stages of stories. Here’s the maths. An average movie’s, say, 120
minutes. The first twenty are roughly the 20% point. Time isn’t something I’ve
got very much of, so twenty’s the point where I’ll happily bail out if its not
killer. (Recent victims – Dragon Tattoo, re-make of Dragon Tattoo, Golden
Compass, Hobbit, Sherlock 2, new Star Trek 2, that thing about a boat in a
storm with Robert Redford.)
Equally though, twenty’s the point where you know
you’re totally aligned with the world of the story, the motivation of the characters,
the direction of travel, the mood and theme – and you’re going to follow it all
the way to the end.
I thought to myself: if I watched the #firsttwentyminutes of
three films I really
like, I might learn something.
So I did… and I did. Here’s what happened:
(i) 28 Days Later
An iconic opening reminiscent of The Walking Dead. I’ve blogged about it
before here but what really struck me was this: the story-proper begins bang on
twenty minutes. To the second, I mean. It goes like this: we get the activists
raiding the animal-testing facility, the grotesque apes hammering at the glass
of their cages, the beasts released, the initial infection, the go-to-black,
then those phenomenal shots of Cillian Murphy wandering a silent and empty
London in his hospital pj’s. Twenty minutes clocks up, and he steps into a
church. His adventure begins.
(ii) The Ghost
This was uncanny. Again: it’s to the damn second. There’s a lovely
opening scene on a ferry. An abandoned car is towed away after the ferry docks
at Vineyard Haven. The body of its driver is washed up on a nearby beach. Cut
to London: Ewan McGregor chats with his agent about a potentially exciting new
job – ghosting the ex-PM’s memoirs. He gets the gig, flies out to New York and
travels out to Martha’s Vineyard, the scene of the ferry-death. He steps out of
the back of a cab after a punishing 16-hour journey, ready to start his new
assignment. His adventure begins; twenty minutes, on the nose.
(iii)Signs
Three
in a row. In the first twenty, we get an introduction to an ex-priest living on
a farm surrounded by acres of deep corn fields. Strange stuff is happening and
his kids are attuned to it. Water tastes odd. The dog’s going bonkers. There’s
something out in the fields, and we soon learn it’s responsible for the
appearance of a massive crop-circle. The cops come to investigate. “Don’t call
me ‘Father’”, says Mel Gibson, a man with a tragic past. The following night there’s
another intruder on the farm – unidentified. Crop circles are turning up all over
the world, according to the TV news. Cops return. Refer to Mel Gibson’s
character by his first name. The adventure begins – twenty minutes exactly.
Insert conclusion here, eh? The first thing I did once this all
came together was work out the equivalent for a YA novel of approximately
76,000 words.
It’s the 12,000 mark.
If you want – and I do, given my inability
to plot a book that actually works – a rough rule of thumb, everything’s gotta
be sorted by 12,000; the protagonist, their motivation and flaws, the mood and
atmosphere, tone, world. It’s the place where ‘the adventure begins’. That’s
roughly the end of Chapter Six if you write in Fletcher-sized sections.
I’ve just re-read book 2, The Nightwardens, up to the end of
Chapter Six. The news is… mixed.
Someone pass me the wine.
