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The Genius of Alfred Hitchcock (and what writers can learn from him)

by Lorena Hughes


RopePoster2The other day an old college friend of mine invited me to the Hitchcock Film Festival in a downtown theater I thought had closed  years ago. This art-deco building (circa 1927) has been presenting some of Alfred Hitchcock’s most famous films every Friday night for the last two months.

The movie we watched was Rope (1948) with James Stewart. It’s already been three weeks since I saw it and I’m still thinking about it. Funny because that same weekend I watched Gravity—an expensive display of special effects that Hitchcock could have only dreamed about—and a story that values life above all (almost the exact opposite of Hitchcock’s film). Yet, the movie that keeps popping into my head is Rope, one of Hitchcock’s lesser-known films and produced over 65 years ago. Perhaps if I explain more, you’ll understand why this film impacted me.

Rope was inspired by a famous murder trial from the 1920s. Two affluent college students decide to kill one of their classmates for the simple thrill of killing. As followers of Nietzsche’s philosophy, they believe themselves to be intellectually superior to other mortals and, therefore, above the moral laws of “ordinary” men. They think they can plan and execute the perfect crime and, to make it more thrilling, they hide the corpse inside a chest of books and invite the victim’s friends and parents to a dinner party. In very Hitchcock fashion, they set the dinner buffet on top of the chest.

James Stewart plays the clever schoolmaster who inadvertently instilled this philosophy in the two murderers. Of course, one of the guys is terrified of getting caught, but the other one seems to almost want his former teacher to discover them so he can admire their “masterpiece” crime. The success of the film is in the juxtaposition of tension (anyone could open that chest since the hinge is broken), dark humor (not only in the party set up but also in the dialogue), the motive for the murder (I’ve never heard of something more original) and the Big Question of whether or not the guys will get caught.

But this film was fascinating in both content and form. The entire story develops in real time, in one single setting, and the cuts are nearly imperceptible—one continuous scene with very subtle transitions (Hitchcock focuses on a jacket or an ornament to make his cuts seamless.) It’s no surprise that the film was adapted from a play. In addition to this novelty, we have another element that struck me as original: the camera tells its own story.

Let me explain without ruining the film for those of you who’d like to watch it. Have you noticed how in children’s picture books sometimes there is the story the text tells you, but there are minor stories that you can only see in the illustrations? (this is where a very talented illustrator can thrive). Well, Hitchcock does something similar twice. While the characters are speaking, the camera is moving around them or is focused on another object, making the conversation inconsequential and the visual action what really matters. This is something I haven’t seen in contemporary film making. When dialogue is present in a film, it always supersedes anything that may be going on in a scene.

Because I have a tendency to write complex novels with abundant characters, I always admire writers and directors who can tell simple stories. The plot here is simple: will the guys be successful at hiding their crime?

So here are some of the lessons I learned (as a writer) from this film:

1.  It’s okay to write a story that develops in a short amount of time (and how challenging that is!).

2.  People can have the strangest motives for committing a murder (and the more original, the better).

3.  Keeping the tension in a story is key.

4.  Add humor whenever you can (even if it’s dark).

5.  Plot twists and complicated storylines are not always required to write a gripping tale.

6.  Build a complex backstory (even if you don’t mention all the details), and the story and characters will seem more realistic and believable.

7.  For your ending, keep your audience guessing until the last possible moment.

8.  Suppress the desire to make your main characters a) always sympathetic and b) always safe. Let them make mistakes.

And here are some of the lessons I learned (as a human):

1.  Life is extremely fragile and can end in an instant.

2.  There are a lot of crazy people out there.

3.  Never befriend someone who admires Nietzsche!

And just for fun (and because I like lists), some of the trivia I learned about this film:

1.  James Stewart was not happy with this role.

2.  Hitchcock originally wanted Cary Grant for Stewart’s role, but he declined.

3.  The real-life case which inspired this film, Leopold and Loeb, was never discussed or acknowledged by Hitchcock to any of his writers or cast members.

4.  The attorney who defended Leopold and Loeb, Clarence Darrow, delivered one of the most famous speeches there is against capital punishment—and saved their lives. Both got sentenced to life in prison (plus 99 years each for kidnaping).

5.  According to several online reviewers and the scriptwriter himself, there is a homosexual undertone in the film between the main characters (Leopold and Loeb were allegedly a couple). This may have been the reason why the film didn’t do so well in the box office and why Stewart was not entirely happy with it.

6.  This film is said to have been a reaction to WWII and Hitler’s belief in the superiority of one race (man) over another.

Are you a Hitchcock fan? Do you think there’s a contemporary director who compares with him?


LorenaHughes2Lorena Hughes was born and raised in Ecuador. At age eighteen, she moved to the US to go to college and earned a degree in Fine Arts and Mass Communication & Journalism. She has worked in advertising, graphic design and illustration, but her biggest passion is storytelling. Her historical novel set in South America, The Black Letter, took first place in the 2011 Southwest Writers International Writing Contest (Historical Fiction category), an Honorable Mention at the 2012 Soul-Making Keats Literary Competition, and was a quarter-finalist for the 2014 Amazon Breakout Novel Award (ABNA). She is represented by Liza Fleissig of the Liza Royce Agency and is a freelance writer for What’s Up Weekly. You can find her on Twitter at twitter.com/SisterLorena.


This article was originally published on The Writing Sisterhood blog and is reprinted here by permission of the author.




Trimming the Fat (aka Expendable Scenes) in Your Novel

by Lorena Hughes


frustrated-writer3I don’t blame you if you don’t want to read this post. Revisions can be dreadful, overwhelming, confusing and frustrating for many writers, and the idea of doing them (or reading about them) may sound as fun and exciting as standing in line at an airport security check point. But revisions have a strange quality, they can also be infinitely satisfying once you figure out what needs to be done, and the end result is a stronger manuscript.

One of the reasons why revisions are so difficult is because you must tackle several elements at once: character development, plot progression, pace, prose (to include style, grammar and dialogue), among other monsters. Today, I’m going to focus on what constitutes the structure of your novel: scenes.

Since your novel is basically a sequence of scenes with transitional sentences/paragraphs/thoughts, it’s essential to evaluate each and every one of them as both a unit and a part of a whole. My writer friends tease me because I’m ruthless with them (“If I were you, I would delete this scene” is my motto!). But there is a good reason for my callousness. More often than not, a pacing issue is the result of a scene—or several—that aren’t serving an important purpose in your novel. These “problem scenes” are difficult to spot because we often grow so attached to them. (Very often we need someone else to point them out.) So how do we determine if a scene is important enough to keep or if it’s more problematic than useful?

Here are the five questions I ask myself when evaluating a scene.

1. Is the scene active or reflective?

Ideally, you should have a good balance between active and reflective scenes. Active scenes being the ones where something important happens (an action that moves the story forward), and reflective scenes are those where the character ponders on his situation, informs other characters of his problem or fills the reader with backstory and/or information dumps. In my experience, agents and editors often complain that novels are “too slow.” This problem may be the result of too many introspective scenes or instances where characters engage in ordinary activities.

Arguably, you will need more active than reflective scenes to create a good progression, but the balance of active vs. reflective heavily depends on the genre you’re writing (though the consensus seems to be that even in literary fiction there must be enough action to keep the reader’s interest). In genres such as adventure and thrillers, most of your scenes should be active, but in Women’s Fiction, for example, it’s tolerated and even expected to have many introspective scenes to reflect the author’s voice and the character’s personality.

Once you figure out if your scene is active or reflective, determine whether or not you have too many of one or the other. Perhaps you have too many reflective scenes in a row and the pace would benefit from moving them around (if it doesn’t affect your sequence of events, of course). The same goes for active scenes. Perhaps it’s time to give your character a coffee break from all the chaos surrounding him!

2. Is the scene repetitive?

Do you have similar scenes throughout your book? In other words, have you used the same setting many times before, have you had similar conversations or too many scenes between the same characters? Perhaps it’s just a matter of condensing two scenes together.

3. Is an entire scene necessary to convey this information?

Sometimes we hold on to a scene because we think that the information shared on a particular line of dialogue is vital but we don’t realize that an entire scene may not be necessary in order to divulge this one, tiny, bit of information. When I’ve recommended to my friends to cut scenes that are dragging forever, I try to spot what is important about them and suggest they move this information elsewhere. But what about “show, don’t tell,” you may ask? As you know, “showing” (in this case, enacting a scene) is fundamental for a reader to identify with a character or situation, but not all events are equally interesting or deserve this much attention. It’s your job to determine which events are relevant enough to turn into a scene.

4. What purpose is this scene serving?

It’s important for a writer to understand why a scene deserves to take room in his or her novel. Is the scene in question advancing the story? Enlightening the reader about the character’s past or his quirky personality? Developing a bond or conflict between characters? If you don’t understand the purpose of a scene you’re holding on to for dear life, you may have a problem.

5. If I remove this scene, will it affect the flow of my novel?

My first novel started as a telenovela for the Latin American market. As you know, soap operas have tons of characters and last A VERY LONG TIME. Therefore, writers have the luxury of penning what I call “peripheral scenes.” These are scenes where secondary characters catch up with the main action, or where the heroine ponders her decision with friends, or where a subplot between secondary characters develops (but does nothing for the main plot). When I translated my soap opera to English and formatted it as a novel, I had tons of scenes like these (no wonder my novel was over 143,000 words!). In novels, these scenes are sometimes hard to spot because they can be considered “bonding scenes” between characters. A good test is to evaluate if your novel will suffer if you remove a particular scene. From my experience, it probably won’t. Readers are smart and will catch up with the action without you having to overexplain how things came to be. If you’re doubting the validity of a scene, you’re probably on to something.

In conclusion, the trick to revisions (especially if you’re going to do them on your own) is to be honest with yourself—which can be difficult considering your emotional attachment to your work. As a critique partner, I have noticed that many writers are very resistant to deleting superfluous scenes. (Sometimes they’re more willing to kill a character than a beloved scene!) I think it has to do with the fact that these scenes become familiar to us and it becomes harder to envision our novels without them. However, many times after the deed is done, writers realize how much better their novel flows, and they don’t look back (it’s happened to me several times). It’s rare that after deleting a scene, a writer will bring it back (at least not in its entirety).

What do you think? Do you have an emotional attachment to your scenes or are you ruthless when it comes to evaluating (and getting rid of) them?


LorenaHughes2Lorena Hughes was born and raised in Ecuador. At age eighteen, she moved to the US to go to college and got a degree in Fine Arts and Mass Communication & Journalism. She has worked in advertising, graphic design and illustration, but her biggest passion is storytelling. Her historical novel set in South America, The Black Letter, took first place in the 2011 Southwest Writers International Writing Contest (Historical Fiction category), an Honorable Mention at the 2012 Soul-Making Keats Literary Competition and was a quarter-finalist at the 2014 Amazon Breakout Novel Award (ABNA). She is represented by Liza Fleissig of the Liza Royce Agency and is a freelance writer for What’s Up Weekly. You can find her on Twitter at twitter.com/SisterLorena.


This article was originally published on The Writing Sisterhood blog, and is reprinted here by permission of the author.




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