Tetro was playing at the Calgary International Film Festival and I went to see it for the following reasons:

1) A friend wanted to see it.

2) It was written and directed by Francis Ford Coppola.

3) It had an interesting tagline (Every Family Has a Secret) and summary (Bennie travels to Buenos Aires to find his long-missing older brother, a once-promising writer who is now a remnant of his former self. Bennie’s discovery of his brother’s near-finished play might hold the answer to understanding their shared past and renewing their bond.)

4) It received rave reviews.

Don’t get me wrong, I am not against film festivals, but I have found one has to be careful to avoid “challenging but rewarding” films (which is really just code for, “That movie really, really sucked, and I would like my time and money back, but I contributed to the arts, and if I remind myself of that enough times I won’t resent everyone involved for tricking me so shamelessly.”)

Unfortunately, even with four solid reasons to see the movie, I ended up seeing a challenging but rewarding movie. Rather than complain to you in the form of a negative movie review, I figured we could all gain something from the 127 minutes I spent wishing I had snuck into a different movie.

There were a few things that Francis Ford Coppola did that corrupted the storyline for me and at Recliner Books, we encounter some of those same things in manuscript submissions. So let’s look at some of those things so you can avoid them in your writing.

Problem Number One

Have you ever heard of a literary device known as “Chekhov’s Gun”? Anton Chekhov was a Russian short-story writer and playwright. I’ll let him explain his thoughts on fire arms as they pertain to storytelling.

“One must not put a loaded rifle on the stage if no one is thinking of firing it.”

“If you say in the first chapter that there is a rifle hanging on the wall, in the second or third chapter it absolutely must go off. If it’s not going to be fired, it shouldn’t be hanging there.”

This has evolved to include more than just guns but is usually limited to weapons. In the first half of the movie one of the main characters finds a gun. Even though there were plenty of reasons and opportunities for it, at no point did the gun go off. Which begs the question; why was there a gun at all?

In my opinion, this boils down to conserving your words. If you’ve written a novel you may say to yourself, “I don’t have to be as careful with my novel as I have been with my short stories; in a short story every word counts, in a novel, almost every word counts.” If this is your mindset then I hope something changes it.

I cannot stress this enough: in a novel every word matters. If your manuscript is accepted for publication, it should hurt your heart every time an editor wants to take out a word because you’ve spent so many hours agonizing over which words should go and which ones should stay. Of course, the editor will probably have a point, but I hope you know what I mean.

Problem Number Two

There are a lot of ways to dissect a story, for now I am going to say there are three parts to a story: back story (what happened before the story begins), story proper (what you write about), future story (what will happen as a result of the story proper). Generally speaking, back story should be used sparingly and future story only finds its way to the page in a sequel.

When you begin to tell a story your audience begins to form expectations about the scope of your story. Tetro messed with my expectations and as a result I felt like I watched three bad movies instead of one (potentially) good one.

This isn’t to say you should never experiment with the back story and story proper (if your reader feels like you are experimenting with the future story, it’s probably too long), but be prepared for some confusion, criticism, and correction.

Problem Number Three

Let your story speak for itself. One of the most discouraging things we encounter with manuscript submissions occurs when a narrator repeatedly says, “Look at how dramatic this is!!!!! Don’t you feel so bad for the protagonist???”

Obviously no one is using those exact words but their narrative is soaked in this sentiment. Good writing stands up for itself. If you’ve done your job as a writer most people who read your work will feel the feelings you want them to feel and think the things you want them to think. If you have to cheat and tell them how to feel then you haven’t done your job.

Without going into specifics; Tetro had to cheat and that’s one of the reasons it stunk. The lesson I learned: if a movie is directed by Francis Ford Coppola and written by someone else (perhaps Mario Puzo) then it might be worth a shot. If it is written and directed by Francis Ford Coppola, proceed with caution.

P.S.

Problem Number Four

To be fair, this entry is not perfect. I used the word “story” twenty-one times in this 900-word blog entry. This is also bad storytelling.