Designing Your Character & Other Handy Things

Movie Cliches (Works for books too)

Airplanes

Piston-engine airplanes in the movies are unusually subject to engine failure. This failure mode is unique to filmdom - engine coughs, keeps running. Hero doesn't notice. Then it stutters, catches again. Hero notices, taps gas gauge, turns lever. Then it stutters exactly three times and stops immediately, including propeller. No further efforts are ever made to restart.

Alcohol

Only men are alcoholics. 

Any hopeless alcoholic can quit drinking when faced with an important challenge. The instant the alcoholic stops drinking, all his faculties return and he faces no annoying withdrawals.

Aliens

If there is more than one or two of an alien race, they are always roughly the same size as humans.

Aliens usually speak english and have same colloquialisms. 

All members of alien species wear the same outfits, including clothing, hairstyles, and jewelery. This makes them readily identifiable. Aliens who do not dress like aliens are hiding something. This may, in fact, be a consequence of the fact that aliens all have single, monolithic cultures: one language, one religion, one outfit, per planet.

Animals

Bad guys will always get killed by a snake, while the hero simply reaches out and picks it up with his bare hands. (In addition, he will either break the reptile's neck (?) or bite it's head off). 

Deadly reptiles will always attack a woman first, even if she's in the presence of thirty men. 

 Dogs always know who's bad, and bark at them.

Answering Machines

If the hero listens to his answering machine and one important message is unexpected then he usually has two very short messages on the tape before, one spoken by a man, one by a women. "Here'a John! I see you tomorrow at eight.".... beep ... "This is Sallieeeeee! I'll call again later." ... beep .... and then finally "Ahhhh! The killer is .....". If however the message is expected be sure that it will be the first one on the tape.

Asteroids

Here are the fundamental principles of movie asteroid science, as derived from the NBC miniseries "Asteroid":

Asteroids travel through space making a noise like a powerful but subdued engine. 

 Asteroids are usually locked into orbits, but if a comet comes by, they can be bumped out of their rut and become dangerously unstable. It's only the fact that everything is locked into an orbit which prevents collisions in our solar system. 

Any asteroid that gets loose is certain to crash into Earth within a matter of hours. It's just barely possible to evacuate Kansas City to a distance of 100 miles in 48 hours. This requires lots of airplanes. It also requires martial law, so that "looters will be arrested on sight". (Have they no mercy?) With 30+ hours to go, people will panic in the streets and run around at random. 

 A mile-wide asteroid can mostly burn up in the atmosphere, causing it to do only a relatively small amount of damage (bursting a dam) when it strikes. A river from a burst dam can exactly keep pace with a pickup truck for several minutes. It will then obligingly pause as the pickup truck turns around and goes in another direction.  When a raging river washes over a pickup truck on a bridge, the bridge won't be damaged, the truck won't be swept off the bridge, and people in the open back of the truck won't be swept away.