Tag Archives: writing

Do you see what I see?

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How can you NOT want to describe this place?

How can you NOT want to describe this place?

Now that I have worked on several screenplays, which I have shared with a number of friends and fellow writers, I have come to a conclusion: I am a novelist.

Fret not, fellow travellers. I say this not to suggest I will cease to write screenplays but more in recognition of an inherent weakness in my screenplays, or perhaps more accurately, in myself. I am addicted to narrative.

The problem is I instinctively write what I see, even when I only see it with my mind’s eye. If I were a painter, I would own brushes that only had one or two hairs. The concept of a paint roller would be anathema.

Nothing in a scene is unimportant to me. I see people, things, phenomena in terms of metaphor, although I do my best to avoid poetry.

I cannot simply write: The boat bobbed wildly on the waves. (Even writing that line now was taxing to me.)

Instead, I’m inclined to write: The battle-weary skiff, a patchwork of wood and fibreglass, tossed helplessly on the ocean swells, each wave of its own purpose, refusing to work together toward anything resembling a current.

The former is what is happening. The latter is how I envision it. To me, everything is a character in a story—an antagonist, an ally, a victim—and as such has its own story arc, however small.

I also want to make sure that my reader “sees” the movie I would like to make—the challenge of a pictorial and aural medium presented literally. I want the reader to “feel” the scene before the first word of dialogue is spoken, both to establish the mood of the scene and give a sense of how the line is said.

Unfortunately, in my zeal to be informative, I instead become onerous or tedious. My screenplay becomes a challenge to read as long tracts of narrative slow the story to a crawl. Instead of making it easier to read my manuscript, I’ve made it more challenging and less desirable.

I was once accused of writing a travelogue of Northern Italy in a screenplay. Oh, what I had written was beautiful and made some people dream of travelling to the region—Lago Maggiore—but 90% of what I had written was completely unnecessary to the telling of the story.

So, what to do?

As of this moment, my writing process is my writing process, and I believe that any attempt to significantly change it would simply increase my challenges in writing at all. No, better to have written a first draft badly than to have never written.

Instead, I have chosen to rely on this little miracle I have discovered. They call it Draft Two. This will be my chance to go through my screenplay with a harsh eraser, and remove all of the lines or description that is not absolutely necessary to tell my story or to explain a character’s behaviour.

Sure, this may necessitate some rewriting of dialogue so that I don’t end up with mile-long verbal tracts. But in all likelihood, these speeches were too long and in desperate need of shortening.

One step at a time, though, for today, I continue to write Draft One of my screen-novel.

(Image is property of owner and is used here without permission, but plenty of description if you read my screenplay.)

Something from nothing

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“I don’t know what to write about.”

It is the clarion call of procrastinators worldwide.

There is this pervasive belief that if you are not writing about something then you are not really writing. As though words have no power, no authority unless they are tied to some portentous subject. Free association, it would appear, is not free. And yet, ironically enough, nowhere is this written. It is a myth.

It is just as valid to write about nothing as it is to write about something. To make no conjectures, to postulate no theories, to hold no opinions aside from the personally pleasing juxtaposition of two or more words.

Just as people can speak forever and yet say nothing of lasting import, so too can people wax jibberish and yet speak volumes.

In painting, we can view both delicately rendered images of nature in all its glory (my personal favourite is Robert Bateman) or the seeming chaotic void of splatter on canvas. Both are art, but speak to different tastes and preferences. Why too cannot words, which are merely the medium that in and of themselves hold little meaning?

Write about nothing. Tap into your inner anarchist, your inner artist, to express yourself in splashes of verbiage that may mean little in isolation but so much more in toto.

Embrace the freedom and release the fear that comes from working without a destination or plan. Fill the void with noise of your soul and spirit, only to discover the noise is in fact a song the tune of which you don’t yet recognize.

I think you’ll find that in writing about nothing, you will find something, and you will stand amazed.

Nothing is rarely nothing

Nothing is rarely nothing

I had no idea

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Ideas are everywhere, but they don't always look like ideas

Ideas are everywhere, but they don’t always look like ideas

“How the heck did you come up with that?”

It’s a common question I get when talking about my latest ideas, and for years, my answer was a resounding “I dunno…just came to me.”

To a limited extent, the response is correct, but it suggests the process of ideation is much more passive or deus ex machina than it really is.

Ideas surround me, as they do you. They are in the nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs that make up our moment-by-moment reality. They are in the streetcar in which I presently ride, the streets down which I presently travel.

In the dark-haired beauty two rows before me who is fixated on adjusting her hair rather than close the window through which the hair-mussing breeze blows. And in the armada of free-range humans who occupy the parkette we just passed, proving themselves houseless rather than homeless.

The challenge for many would-be writers is that these are starting points for ideas rather than fully fledged stories or subjects. These are the writers who wish to be reporters or chroniclers rather than explorers.

Think instead of these idea kernels as pieces of clay, as something that can be moulded into any of a thousand other shapes. Take the kernel and play with it for a while. Give yourself a chance to see what it feels like, smells like, sounds like, tastes like.

Twist it. Turn parts of it over. Reverse its halves.

What is something were feasting on Toronto’s homeless? Imagine a mobile service that will do your hair and makeup while you commute to work. What if a terrorist planted a bomb on a streetcar and it had to travel no slower than 50 mph? Or an aesthetician to the deceased in From Hair to Eternity.

All of these are probably bad ideas, but the ideas have evolved.

Twist it again. Mould it again. Press it onto something else, like so much Silly Putty, and see what sticks.

Keep the good. Set aside the bad. But keep working it until something you really like begins to show itself.

You have no idea the wonders you will discover.

The word was cat – an exercise

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“Cat killer,” Anthony thought to himself, ruefully. He was now going to be forever known as the cat killer of Borden Street.

To be fair, it was an accident. At worst, negligent manslaughter. Catslaughter?

Yes, if Anthony had gotten his car tuned up as he’d been promising himself for weeks, he might have noticed the strange sound emanating from his motor. But a “rowr” sounds an awful lot like a “rawr”, so it was hardly his fault.

Why would a cat crawl on the engine block in the first place? And it’s not like Anthony held its tail against the fan belt.

No. It was a mercy killing. Clearly, living in a house with 17 other cats had taken its toll on Snowball. She had lost the will to live and decided to end her days.

It was Old Lady MacGillvary’s fault. Nobody needs 18…17 cats. A sign of mental defectiveness on a grand scale.

Hell, Anthony was lucky it wasn’t the old woman herself who flung around his engine like a piñata on heroin.

Anthony liked cats. Well, he tolerated them. He’d never killed a cat before. Two dogs, a ferret and a budgerigar, sure, but never a cat.

It was a bad year for pets in his neighbourhood.

As he recalled, the Great Dane was an automotive accident, his hood still bearing the scars, and the chow was proof that you shouldn’t buy electric garden lamps from a guy in a van on the highway.

The ferret shouldn’t have been loose while he mowed the lawn, and why the bird was anywhere near his barbecue while he was using his leaf blower is anyone’s guess.

It had gotten so bad that Anthony had to beg off a trip to the petting zoo with his nephew for fear of dropping a horse on the kid.

You’d think Anthony’s job as a taxidermist would come in handy here, but apparently a stuffed pet is considered poor compensation for a loss.

The point was moot where Snowball was concerned. All the King’s horse and all the King’s men, you know?

Oh well, Anthony shrugged, no use crying over eviscerated Persian. If he took the highway to work, most of the fur would probably fall out and cooked flesh is so much easier to extract from metal.

Anthony turned the motor over, listening for the familiar “rawr”, and then put the car in reverse.

Thump.

Not quite dead – an update

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Hey folks,

For those of you who may be wondering, did he lose all of his fingers in a fire, the answer is no, I just haven’t really had the capacity or inspiration to write much of late.

Between a beautiful week in Victoria (as evidenced by the photographs) to a serious chest cold (worst vacation souvenir EVAR!) to moving to a new apartment, I just haven’t had the brain space to put pen to paper (I’m old fashioned that way) for anything more than my screenwriting homework.

I am, however, a writer at the chromosomal level, and so I fully expect to be back in full verbosity in the near future, when I will continue to astound (?), inspire (?), inflame (?) and amuse (??) you.

Until then, I wish you well and say “Ooh, look, it’s a bee!”

 

New neighbourhood

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Selling out versus selling

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Over the last few years, I have met a lot of artists of various stripes, and almost to a person, one of the major fears each has is the belief that to become a success and to make a living with their Art, they will have to dilute that art. They’ll have to sell out. Some simply fear it in quaking silence, while others fend it off with flecks of foam like some rabid dog chained in a backyard of their own making. To each, their own.

You have a vision for your Art and you must respect that. It is because you are doing your Art that your Art is different from anyone else’s. By the same token, if you do hope to make enough money to keep at it, you must be able to express your Art in some commercial way.

Admittedly, with technologies such as self-publishing (formerly known as vanity publishing) and phones that offer better cinematography than anything Cecile B could have dreamt of, you can go it alone as no one before you could. You can make all of your dreams come true, but the question is, will those dreams come true? Will anyone beyond your mom, your partner and a few close friends bother with your Art once discovered?

I’m not saying to make a living you have to sell out. Don’t despoil your craft in the name of crass commercialism. If you’re truly an artist rather than a hack, it wouldn’t serve your purposes and you’d come to loathe the thing you once loved.

No, I’m talking about finding a line of compromise between your vision and the market’s.

As this is particularly close to my heart right now, let’s say that you’re writing a screenplay. First, congratulations. There may be thousands of screenplays out there, but I am confident there are billions of unfinished scripts and half-thought ideas.

Having completed your screenplay, however, is only the first step. Now you’ve got to share your creation with dozens of other people, each of whom will want to put his or her stamp on the work.

Story editors, readers, producers, directors, actors, financiers, market researchers. To a greater or lesser extent, each of these people has to buy into what you’re selling before your movie will get made.

Sure, if your film is small with a very modest (miniscule) budget, all of these titles may be handled by 3 to 6 people, but even then, you’ll likely run into issues with distribution.

I’m not saying it can’t be done. History is replete with artists who decided to go it alone. But the unwritten backdrop of that history is swamped with the myriad films sitting idle on bookshelves or hard drives, or competing with cavorting kittens and bad karaoke on YouTube or Vimeo.

If you want to share your Art—and I’m betting that you do—then you want outside thought, you want feedback, you want people to contribute.

Don’t look at barriers, but rather seize opportunities to engage. These people are your first audience. Respect them. Use them. Understand them. Do this and you’ll be well on your way to realizing your vision in their world.

 

(Image is property of owner and is used here without permission because I refuse to let anyone sell out.)

Adapt or die

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Recently, I’ve read a couple of screenplays based on novels, and with this albeit low number of examples, let me start by saying thank goodness I have yet to find a book I wish to adapt for screen. The process, it would seem, is tedious and fraught with perils.

Odds are, especially if you are just starting out as a writer, you’ve chosen to adapt a specific book because you love it.

You love the way it is written. You love the story it tells. You love the characters. You may even love the paper on which it’s printed or its cover art.

Congratulations. You’re doomed.

I say this not to be mean but to point out that the book was written as a book for very specific reasons. The format and structure of a novel is incredibly different from that of a film.

At its simplest, you have the space in a novel to indulge yourself in narrative and character introspection. More simply put, you can describe a setting or reaction in such detail that if linearly translated to a screenplay, it would result in ten minutes of film focused exclusively on waves rolling across a beach or on the angle of an eyebrow raised over the left eye of your heroine.

Even simpler, novels are verbal, ironically, while films are visual.

And unless you’re planning on running a voice over throughout your movie—please say no—I have no idea what your characters are thinking. I can try to guess from their facial expressions, but it is a guess and will have as much to do with how easy it was to find a parking place in the megaplex as it does with the actor’s talent.

The novel could afford to be 500 or 1000 pages. Your screenplay can’t.

I love Kenneth Branagh. I love Shakespeare. Branagh did a very linear interpretation of Hamlet for film. I was bored. Mel Gibson’s Hamlet? Held my attention and was entertaining. [Compare the two “alas, poor Yorick” scenes linked here.]

The difference? A very sharp editorial knife.

So, I am going to ask you to take the thing you love and hack it. Cut it with broad strokes and wild abandon. This is no place for finesse.

This isn’t about trimming paragraphs. It is about slashing subplots or entire chapters. It is about burning away all of the decorative niceties until you reach the essence that turns your crank.

Be cruel. Be ruthless. Be honest.

Take that Sistine Chapel and reduce it to the handful of bricks that make you sweaty; that keep you coming back time after time.

It will feel like murder. In some ways, it is. But it’s murder for the greater good, because once you’ve hit that core, you can begin to rebuild. You can start to rescue some of the elements you set aside earlier or add new ones that are truly unique to your vision.

What is that core? I don’t know. That’s for you to decide.

Maybe it was the setting. Perhaps it was the relationship between two characters.

Whatever it is, find it and make that your story. That is what you love. That is why you keep coming back for more.

Honour that and you’ll have a screenplay worth turning into a movie.

(Image is property of owner and is used here without permission. I’m adaptable that way.)

Faith

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Faith is believing when common sense tells you not to.

– Fred Gailey (John Payne), Miracle on 34th Street

 

We all have doubts.

Doubt that we are good enough to accomplish our goals. Doubt that our goals are even realistic or rational.

And sadly, most if not all of us have had or currently have a long line of people who are more than willing to feed those doubts with their own. Often, their superficial motive is to be supportive, to help cushion the blow of failure, to save you from certain doom. But more likely, their motive is to take comfort in the belief that your doubts make it okay for them to have doubts about their own lives.

But, if you’re lucky, you have those special few in your life who have absolutely no doubt in your future success. They’re the ones who listen to your ideas with a smile, an eager nod, and perhaps some sage constructive advice to help make your goals even more realistic.

The latter group are the people you need to heed, for they see the potential of your efforts in the absence of your fears and just as importantly, in the absence of their own.

I am not a religious man—although I have become quite spiritual—so faith has never been top of mind for me until recently. It’s not that I didn’t have faith, in hindsight, but rather that I had a very narrow definition of it. And, like my friends for me, it was easy to have faith in things external. It was faith in myself that I lacked.

More recently, however, I have realized that faith isn’t about rejecting the possibility of failure. Rather it is about accepting the possibility of failure but with the further understanding that failure does not mean your journey has ended.

Failure does not put your destination off limits. It is merely a diversion from your original path to that destination.

I know I am a good writer and story teller, but I also know I have challenges ahead in translating those skills into the money I need to make to continue writing and story telling.

Faith comes in telling myself (and believing) that through hard work on my part (e.g., networking, classes, practice) and unknown forces outside of my control and understanding, those challenges will dissipate at the appropriate time.

Like those well-intentioned naysayers, drawing a line in the sand about giving up (e.g., going back to my former career) only gives voice to my doubts. I will not allow myself to do that anymore.

I have faith that I will endure failure and that I will succeed at whatever it is I am to accomplish, no matter what street I live on.

I wish you that faith as well.

 

For an interesting piece on questions about talent and faith therein, check out this post from Plotting Bunnies: The ingredients of Writing: Talent…?

(Image is property of owner and is used without permission because I have faith they’ll get my point.)

Indirect influences

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I naturally speak with one voice. If pressed, I can speak with a second, more professional voice; the one that presents concepts to advertising clients or interviews corporate executives for a magazine. But most of the time, I speak with one voice that uses a vocabulary and attitude established over my many decades of life.

I think this is largely the case for everyone, which is why it is not surprising that people tend to write stories with a series characters that can largely sound the same. The protagonist is typically quite distinct. The antagonist is often distinct. But after that, I don’t know that I could tell who was speaking if I didn’t read the names.

These secondary characters, by their very nature, are not our focus as writers, so they tend to have the least developed back stories even in our heads. Other than age or gender, what makes the paperboy different from the local sheriff from the school teacher?

The same thing that makes you different from me. Our experiences, past and present.

One of the tricks for informing a character that I learned in improv was to endow a character with a trait that only you as the performer knew, and ideally a trait that had absolutely nothing to do with the scene that was developing.

In one exercise, I decided that my character had a bad right ankle, so that every time I took a step, my ankle would cause me pain. I didn’t hobble or verbally express the pain with either an “Ow” or “Would you slow down, my ankle hurts”.

The pain was expressed, however, in how my character responded to his environment and the other characters in the scene. What might have been a middle-of-the-road character suddenly became a terse character, someone in a hurry to get things over with, quick to anger or frustrate, less apt to engage in activities.

The bonus aspect of the exercise, for me, was that my fellow improv performers quickly got and responded to my character, but when pressed, could not exactly say why I behaved as I did.

Now change that ankle pain to a foot orgasm (read about it this week online) and see where that character would go (probably jogging).

The sore ankle had no impact on what role the character played in the scene, but more in HOW that character performed that role. And this made the character stand out from all of the others.

I go back to this exercise often, when I find myself creating secondary or tertiary characters that aren’t differentiated from the background. A little something to make them stand out, however briefly, in their scene.

If you find yourself stuck, give it a shot. What could it hurt, other than possibly your ankle?

(Image is property of owners and is used here without permission, because it makes me happy/indifferent/snarky/hot.)