102. You keep inventing new rules as we go along!

Sword and sorcery writers love to do this. I hate it, hate it, hate it. I can’t be the only one.

In a moment of great stress or peril, late in the tale, does your character suddenly figure something out (that you forgot to set up) he needs for the plot to advance? How does he get this new found information that allows him to move forward with the story? Why didn’t you give it to him when you handed him his Utility Belt 25 pages ago?

For some reason, this kind of nonsense happens all the time in sword and sorcery films. Not in Lord of Rings, however. Frodo has to throw the ring in the mountain fire and that’s it. Simple. They don’t keep inventing new stuff as you go along. 

It’s like “For the whole damn movie, I have been trekking toward the Mountain of Doom so I can throw the Book of Evil into the Cleansing Fire. But now that I’ve (finally!) gotten here, ho ho, forgot to tell you, I must first read the Book of Evil with the Spectacles of Fate (that the Crone of Ugliness has under her tuffet) while wearing the Shroud of Wisdom that I have to now go and wrest from the Wicked Development Executive in the Black Tower.” 

Tell us the rules at the beginning and then don’t tell us any more.

Look at all the explaino about the Staff of Ra and the city of Tannis in Raiders of the Lost Ark. Best exposition and telling of the rules, ever. They do it once, and it’s over.

Sadly, if you want a guidebook on where not to journey, look at the most recent Raiders Of The Lost Ark. It’s a heap of new rules piled on a slew of new information glommed onto more and more explaino. It’s numbing. And, at the very very end of the film, just when you thought it was safe to go back to your car, Morris the Explainer, John Hurt, tells us that the bad guys were beings from another damn dimension. Oh really? By then, I was brain dead.

You might also check out Pirates Of The Caribbean 3. A fantabulous example of “don’t keep telling us new rules as you go along.” 

Pirates waits and waits and waits for the pirate council to convene. It’s the main goal of the story...then, when they finally meet, someone tells us, “Hey, dudes, guess what! We need to elect a Pirate King!” Where did that come from? They tell us about the rules for electing a Pirate King, none of which we’ve ever heard before, and then they change those brand new rules so Keira Knightley can be elected! It’s so aggravating. 

There’s all kinds of yakking about what it takes to bring someone back from the dead. They make it up as they go along, telling us each new nuance as it’s happening, which is totally confusing, and we’re supposed to just swallow it whole.

Their ship falls off the biggest waterfall in the history of the world... vanishing in the mist... then, miraculously, everybody wanders up on shore somewhere, not dead! How the heck did that happen?

Orlando Bloom asks Keira Knightley to marry him... and we had no idea he even had the hots for her! 

The Jamaican woman suddenly turns into a bad guy. Then she’s got a new name and persona, and, out of the blue, a romance in the past with Davy Jones. Then, suddenly, she’s fifty feet tall. She turns into a zillion little fiddler crabs. Then she turns into a maelstrom. And then she’s never seen again.

Johnny Depp’s ship is stolen at the end. By whom? Why? How?

I could go on, but it’s too depressing. Rent the DVD. Make your own list. Be sure you have a new pen with plenty of ink.

Look at your script. See if you are giving us new rules as we go along. In your next draft, don’t.