Tag Archives: writing

Receiving Feedback – Part One

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Feedback is always difficult, or it should be.

When a sound system suffers feedback, it is a loud resonant noise that increases in pitch as it slowly and achingly bores a hole into your head. Feedback on a piece of writing (or any other piece of art) can feel very much the same.

Unlike the sound system example, however, feedback is vital to the survival and improvement of your art. It will help you understand the places in which people struggle to see your vision. But just as importantly, it helps you see where your efforts resonate—in a positive way—with your audience. The challenge is understanding how much weight you should put on the feedback.

When we first start writing, we tend to wait forever to ask for feedback, often for fear of being told our work sucks. And when we finally do receive feedback, we take all the negatives to heart and may never hear the positives. We then destroy our work by either shelving (deleting) it or by trying to incorporate every piece of feedback into the work. The latter effort results in a work that is either a complete mess that makes no sense, or worse, reflects the tastes and preferences of the person providing feedback and not us, the artist.

We also tend to ask the wrong people for feedback—friends, parents, partners—perhaps in the hope they’ll be gentle with us. Unfortunately, these people don’t tend to have experience with this kind of thing—the “but I know what I like” syndrome—and so the feedback runs the brevity gamut from “I really like it” to “I’m not sure I get it”, none of which is particularly useful or informative.

As we mature in our writing, we may ask a larger number of people to review our stuff, but then we run into the problem of conflicting opinions. And as with the eggs in one basket scenario, we may try to please everyone with changes—destroying our own voice—or simply shelve the whole project. There’s also the possibility that we’ll take the attitude that everyone’s crazy and we’re brilliant, but that doesn’t happen very often at this stage.

We still may not be asking the right people, but we’re more likely in the right ballpark, focusing on other writers. If those writers aren’t at our level or higher, however, the feedback we receive will be helpful but probably won’t get us to the next level. Nobody’s fault. They just probably haven’t developed the critical skills needed to help us find not just challenges but also ways to solve them.

So, what’s a poor writer to do?

In Part Two, I’ll offer some thoughts on how best to approach the challenge of asking for and receiving feedback.

I want this to be an open conversation, however, and welcome you to contribute your experiences or thoughts to the conversation as well.

My brother has his own way of dealing with feedback, but he's a pretty good guy nonetheless.

My brother has his own way of dealing with feedback, but he’s a pretty good guy nonetheless.

Horse Island

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A novel I had started working on a while ago as part of a Humber College workshop on opening pages; i.e., how to attract the eye of acquisition editors.

Really need to get back to this.

Sasha had never had her breasts go numb before.

Sure, she’d lost feeling in her fingers and had suffered frostbitten toes more than once, but this was something else altogether. But then, she’d also never spent six hours prone on a rock in the middle of the North Atlantic.

Sasha had fought off sleep for the last two hours, listening to the rhythm of the waves that charged the beach that sprawled below her. Now that the sun had started to peek above the horizon, she could focus her attention on the dark shapes floating just offshore, knowing that not all of them would be pieces of driftwood slowly making their way from the seaside forests of Newfoundland.

“Get used to this,” she thought to herself. “You’ll probably spend your next four or five Springs this way.”

It was definitely a far cry from the relative civility of her life in Toronto—although maybe sterility was a better way of describing it. The sounds and flavours of the ocean did, however, remind her of the summers she spent with her grandparents at the family home just outside of Halifax.

Funny, she thought, this was the first time she’d thought—allowed herself to think—about her grandparents. All those years spent trying to escape the East Coast and here she was, smack in the middle of it again.

Adjusting her position ever so slightly, Sasha grunted inwardly, trying to remain the silent sentinel while allowing her blood to circulate to her chilled extremities. But even as she settled back in, she knew that something was different. Something had changed in the surf. Some of the driftwood had started to move with purpose, making a beeline for the beach.

It was time to prepare her kit and call the others.

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(Okay, I don’t have any photos of Atlantic Canada, so I’m substituting this one from Tofino.)

 

The word was “Thirsty”

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The result of another writing exercise…and the slow recognition that almost everyone I write about is seriously messed from by previous relationships. Ah, hindsight.

“Thirsty?” Jim asked, as he watched Phil throw back yet another pint of beer without coming up for a breath.

“L’il bit,” was all Phil would say as he signaled the bartender for another round.

Jim had seen Phil drink before, but there was something different tonight; something desperate about the way Phil was pounding them back that reminded Jim of a man who was trying to drown himself 12 ounces at a time.

“Something you wanna talk about?” he asked, as he watched Phil connect the sweat rings left on the bar by the humid glasses; a massive game of connect-the-dots with no picture in sight.

Phil just sat there, head down, slightly slumped forward. The fact that his eyes were open was Jim’s only clue that he hadn’t fallen asleep; that and the random ministrations of a finger on autopilot, running across the bar.

Without Jim realizing it had happened, two more pints had suddenly shown up on the bar, bubbles rising skyward to form a frothy blanket across the top of the glass. Jim looked at his own mostly full glass and realized that he was falling seriously behind. Over the sound of his own gulping, he thought he heard Phil say something.

He looked over to see Phil staring at him with very weary eyes. Jim shuddered. Phil was only two years older than his own 42 years, but right now, he had the eyes of someone twice as old; someone who had been run over by life and was too tired to hide it.

“She called today,” said a voice that seemed to come from nowhere. “She called the office.”

Without explanation, Jim knew that “she” was Phil’s ex-wife Jacklyn; a wraith who liked to appear every so often to throw Phil off kilter. It wasn’t anything malicious, mind you. It was just that neither of them had ever really accepted that they were divorced. Phil and Jacklyn were proof that no matter how much two people love each other, no matter how much you live for the other’s company, that is still no guarantee of a successful marriage.

“How is she?” Jim asked, as much to fill the void as out of interest.

“Dunno,” Phil replied, between mouthfuls of beer. “I was out.”

A new low, Jim thought. Phil hadn’t even spoken to her and he was in a state. This didn’t bode well for the rest of the evening.

Beautiful sadness was the first thing I thought when I lined up this shot (Tofino)

Beautiful sadness was the first thing I thought when I lined up this shot (Tofino)

Sloppy Seconds™

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Do you have trouble coming up with original ideas? Do you think you suck because your ideas blow?

Well, worry no more. Let me introduce you to Sloppy Seconds™, the concept that’ll put spunk back into your body.

Sloppy Seconds™ is all about taking what somebody else started and going one step further for a bigger finish. It’s about taking the worry out of satisfying those opening urges and putting all of your focus on the climax. Ideas that will send a chill down everyone’s spine and get them crying out for more.

How can I enjoy Sloppy Seconds™, you ask? Well, let’s get the ball rolling.

You know that feeling when something is on the tip of your tongue, but you can’t quite put your finger on it? Well, let somebody else swallow the responsibility of getting things started. Let them put it out there and once it’s on display, grab hold of it, take it all the way in, and make it yours by adding that special little something you have inside you.

If you do that, you’ll find everyone leaves satisfied, and if you go at it long enough, perhaps even sated.

And who knows? When you’re done with it, someone else may come along and make it theirs with a sloppy third. The more people who pile on, typically, the better it gets and the more fun everyone has.

So, the next time you find yourself frustrated, blocked, unable to get things started, give Sloppy Seconds™ a try. Your hands may get tired, but you’ll have a smile on your face.

Sloppy Seconds™: Coming to a location near you.

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BTW: This is talking about brainstorming…you know, starting with someone else’s creative idea and then adding your own personal spin to get a story started. I’m not sure what you were thinking about.

I said that out loud, didn’t I?

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Several years ago, when I was first starting out as a professional writer, I received the opportunity to work for a couple of monthly science magazines published by the American Chemical Society. Eager to impress and excited at the thought of seeing my name bylined, I dove into every project with relish…and apparently very little forethought.

A regular ritual at the magazines was for the entire editorial staff to sit down every couple of weeks and hammer out the best headlines for each of the next issue’s articles. Rather than leave the job to the individual writers, my Editor felt this was the best way to get the best ideas. In principle, I agree with him, although you also have to be wary of sliding into group-think, where the lowest common denominator wins…but I digress.

In the first such meeting in which I was invited to participate—second week on the job—we were trying to come up with a title for the health article, which discussed the sexually transmitted infection chlamydia and the fact that many women with the infection didn’t know they had it. After listening to a couple really boring titles, I decided to show how clever and punny I was, and chose to riff off the title of a movie that was popular at the time.

Chlamydia. A quiet killer. It was obvious.

Silence of the Clams!

Silence of the editorial meeting, more like. My Editor looked at mean, turned his head sideways, and said “You’re serious.”

Oh, oh. Something’s gone wrong. Something doesn’t make sense. Why is everyone looking at me like that? Why is…? Oh, shit.

Luckily, everyone in the office thought it was funny, probably more because of the look on my face rather than any inherent amusement. But that’s the point. I kept the job and wrote much better headlines—or at least more acceptable ones—for several more years.

Since that day, I have instituted (if only for myself) what I call “the 12-year-old boy rule”.

Basically, if you want to print anything, you should always say it out loud in front of a 12-year-old boy, and if he even so much as smirks, there is something salacious in your idea and you really need to rethink it.

Still, every once in a while, I wonder if I couldn’t make that title work (other than for porn).

And of course, I am still addicted to puns, much to the chagrin of most people who know me.

Game face

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Visit any professional sports locker room before a competition and you will see all kinds of rituals being performed. In some cases, music blares and bodies rock side-to-side as the players psych up for combat. Or the room will be deafeningly quiet as players turn inward to find a source of personal strength. Some pray. Some pound each other on their gear. Some attempt speeches that would make Henry V blush.

It’s about getting your head into the game. Putting on your game face.

I do the same thing with my writing. Well, perhaps not the same thing, but similar things. For me, writing is about being in the moment and being ready to accept what comes.

Writing takes training. Writing takes practice. But most of all, writing takes preparation.

If I know I want to explore a certain mood in my writing, I may listen to music that stimulates that mood in me. Right now, as I write this, I am listening to Division Bell by Pink Floyd.

Or I may watch a movie or two (perhaps just scenes) from which to take emotive and cosmic inspiration.

Other times, I may simply require quiet. Time to channel my energies completely to the task, without distraction.

Unfortunately, as much as I can do to control external distractions, I can only do so much about internal distractions. One way I accomplish this, however, is through practices that I describe as mental Etch-a-Sketch, activities that allow me to shake my mental landscape enough to erase the noise.

My predominant method is the card game Solitaire. The game does not tax me mentally, but requires just enough synaptic pattern-matching activity that it clears the slate of the noise. (I also like Mah-jongg, but find this takes too much focus to clear my head for anything else, so it remains a hobby.)

Using solitaire was something I learned as a child when I wanted to avoid thinking about things that were going on around me—a way to disappear physically and mentally from my world. But where it was a crutch for several decades of my life, it has now become a useful tool to help me prepare for my artistic efforts.

Once my mind is clear, the energy flows and ideas arrive like so many lightning bugs in the dwindling light. Fleeting inspirations ready to be tapped.

So, now that I have shared my secrets, how do you prepare to write? What is your pre-game ritual?

Let’s talk.

PS These are my stats essentially since the start of 2013…and yes, I live alone.

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Unpacking baggage – Part Two

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In Part One, I discussed the idea that to understand any characters you create and to make them more alive to your audience, you need to understand their baggage, the emotional and psychological events of their past that informs/moulds their behaviours and responses today. Today, I want to talk about making sure you let your audience in on the cosmic joke.

A couple years ago, I wrote a pilot episode for a new sitcom that I was developing—and still am; oh producers, where are’t thou?—and I asked my long suffering wife to read the teleplay.

My concern, I explained, was that of the four main characters, I didn’t feel I had a handle on three. The protagonist I nailed—knew him inside and out—but the other three seemed a little superficial. I wanted a second opinion, though, in case I was just being hard on myself.

Upon reading the script, she asked me a question. [SIDEBAR: Keep all friends who ask questions before offering opinions.]

Which of the four characters did I think I was most like? The protagonist, hands down. She smiled.

Based on her single reading without any background information, she proceeded to describe the other three characters in the script. And nailed them! She matched almost perfectly what I had had in mind for them.

But as was her wont—never in a malicious way—she then burst my bubble by telling me that she had almost no clue as to who the protagonist was, other than he was very similar to me. Without the benefit of 10 years of marriage, the protagonist was a black box. A name followed by narrative action or dialogue.

We walked through scenes and I explained motivations. My explanations made sense to her, but they weren’t on the page. My protagonist was so close to me that it never occurred to me that things weren’t obvious.

More recently, I’ve had the pleasure of reading other people’s developing screenplays, and very often, one of the problems I find as a reader is that I don’t have a clear vision of a character’s motivations in a scene. Why did they do what they did, say what they said?

One fellow student in particular I pressed for explanations about some characters in her otherwise amazing script (which horrified the bejeezus out of me btw). She waxed eloquent on her characters’ motivations and histories, offering amazing little vignettes from their pasts that helped explain why her characters were now behaving as they were.

But it wasn’t on the page!

Before I go further, this is NOT a call for more flashbacks (or cowbells). I am addicted to flashbacks, so I understand their power. Please avoid unless it is really there to move your plot along and not just a underhanded form of exposition designed to keep you from having to learn how to write subtext.

My recommendation to my friend, and something I will do on occasion, is to actually write out those vignettes, full narrative and dialogue, but only for myself and not for inclusion with the screenplay. Don’t just think about them, though. Actively write them out. For it is the act of writing that you will find the emotion of the scene, and it is that emotion that will provide the subtext of your screenplay.

That emotion will inform your dialogue and narrative word choice. That emotion will mould the flow and cadence of your dialogue (e.g., short, terse response vs. raving diatribe). It will also help inform how other characters will respond.

As I have experienced, having this information in my head makes it an intellectual exercise, with all of the cold aloofness that goes with it. But putting it on paper forces you to acknowledge and release those demons. It activates your lizard brain, as another friend of mine liked to call it. It is more visceral, more real.

It also has the added benefit of giving you something back to which you can refer when working on the story after six months of doing something else.

When someone reads your work or an actor performs it, you want to make it as easy as possible for them to get your characters, to understand the turmoil in which your characters function. Except at the highest levels of your story, do not ask your audience to think. It takes them out of the story.

You want them to feel the anger; the amusement; the sadness. If your protagonist is being oppressed, you want your audience to feel angry at the mistreatment, frustrated by the inability to change what is happening, and vindicated/exhilarated when your protagonist triumphs.

They can think on the way home from the theatre or after they close the back cover of the book.

If it is not on the page, none of this will happen. You audience will not engage and your story will suffer.

Sure, it sounds like extra work—it is!—but you’ve already invested this much time and effort on your story. Do you really want to risk that being all for nought because you’re the only one who gets why this story is important?

Who is this man and what is he thinking? What is he waiting for? If he looked at me, would I see boredom, anger, fear, joy?

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(Taken in Tofino, British Columbia.)

Unpacking baggage – Part One

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Have you ever been in an argument with someone and realized that you’re not really arguing about the topic at hand? Reacted emotionally to an event or a person’s actions but not understood why?

We are the baggage we carry. We see everything in our universe through the lens adjustments of past events.

This can lead to problems—toothpaste in the sink upsets me not because there is toothpaste in the sink but because it is merely the latest in a string of actions that prove my feelings aren’t important to you—but it doesn’t have to. I can well up on the subway watching a young person being kind to a senior citizen. That ocular moisture isn’t about them; it’s about my life with my grandmother.

What’s true for you is also true for the characters you create. Long before they showed up on a page in your screenplay or novel, each of your characters led a life. And that life shapes—or should shape—every response and reaction your character has throughout the screenplay.

You’ll hear people—particularly actors—talk about back story. What is this character’s back story? But to me, baggage is a much more appropriate term because I think it speaks so much more to their motivations in life.

Stephanie and Margaret both come from middle-class white homes in the suburbs. They are the same age, are both actors, went to identical schools, have working dads, stay-at-home moms, and two younger siblings—one male, one female—in college. They have the same back story. What about baggage?

Stephanie’s family believe that if you can achieve, you can over-achieve. Success is everything. And while they support her acting career, they really don’t get it. Her brother is studying medicine. Her sister, law. Stephanie was expected to lead by example.

Margaret’s family believe that if you can achieve, you can over-achieve. Success is everything, but it comes from within, not from without. They support her acting career, and even if some of them don’t get it, they’re happy for her. Her engineer brother and biochemist sister come to all of her shows.

In your screenplay, Stephanie and Margaret are on their way to an audition. Both carry coffees through a crowded Starbucks and spectacularly collide, coffees spewing everywhere. How will each react?

Baggage deepens a character. It makes them more real and more sympathetic to the reader or viewer. It subconsciously informs their decisions and their word choice, ideally without dialogue that is completely on the nose (e.g., “Agh, this is like that time in Kapuskasing with my dad!”).

Baggage is indispensable to subtext.

If your character is well-written, the audience should be able to identify his or her baggage and be pretty close to what you were thinking. Although, if they come up with something completely different, they may be pointing out something in you of which you were not aware, which can also be exciting.

As writers, we find it hard enough coming up with the events within our story. For some, the idea of coming up with events and interactions before our story may seem to be extraneous work for no benefit. Without baggage, though, you run the risk that all of your work will have been for nought.

And let’s face it. A story is a journey, and when have you ever gone on a journey without at least a little baggage?

Part Two: Knowing your character’s baggage isn’t enough, in and of itself. You also have to make sure you weave that baggage into the page.

The essentials of my baggage in Costa Rica.

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Write, write a song

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If dictionaries defined phrases and you looked up “glutton for punishment” or “own worst enemy”, I have every confidence you would find a definition along the lines of:

(n) 1. An individual who endeavours to accomplish novel projects through the use of methods for which he or she has no training, expertise and in all likelihood, aptitude. 2. This guy.

It would then show a photo of me, both definitions being equal appropriate.

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As if it wasn’t daunting enough to try to write a screenplay for an animated feature-length family film, I decided it should include songs (a la Lion King or Aladdin) and then went one audacious step further to decide that I should write those songs.

I have no musical training. I don’t know anything about song writing. Heck, the only training I have as a singer involved a record player and a ruler-cum-microphone. (Note to self: Just because you can’t hear you when you wear headphones doesn’t mean that no one can hear you when you wear headphones.)

Tonight, I finally decided to sit down and write the five songs for the movie (and truthfully, that’s only because I’m procrastinating on a rewrite of a scene I hate but do not know how to fix).

The good news is I know what I want each song to cover and roughly the tone I want to establish with it. The bad news is all that stuff I talked about above.

The first song was relatively straightforward as it is a parody of an existing tune. Keep the cadence, change the words. Play the music in the background and try to sing it aloud. Not yet perfect, but it’s a start.

But now, the completely novel songs. Oh boy.

Do I have a cadence?

Why did I pick that word to try to rhyme four times?

Okay, I think I should try to change the tempo here.

Crap! Where’s my chorus?

Is it okay to switch from something Disney-esque to The Pogues?

Oops, can’t use that word…there’ll be kids in the audience.

Why, oh why, do I do these things to myself?

Book larnin’

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Last week, one of my fellow bloggers expressed interest in screenwriting and wondered if I could recommend any good books to help him navigate this format of storytelling, and I promised to do it in a future blog post…well, guess what?

To be honest, my first piece of advice to anyone interested in getting into screenwriting would be to simply tell your story in whatever format comes easiest to you. Because, as I’ve said in a previous post, the most important thing is story. No matter how well formatted your screenplay, if your story doesn’t work, it doesn’t work.

Okay, that soap box being out of the way, my next advice is to take a class in screenwriting, because no matter how much you think you’ll write, there is nothing like the pressure of a deadline for 10 more pages to keep you motivated. And ultimately, until you’ve heard your pages read out loud, you have no idea if you’re getting your thoughts across or using the right words.

So now, on to books. There are few really good books to tell you what a script should look like, so I recommend you simply try to get your hands on several different scripts, whether film or television (although pick your preferred medium, because there are differences in presentation). There are several places on the Internet where you can get free scripts (and when I remember what they are, I will tell you), but for those with a couple of bucks to spare, I highly recommend Planet MegaMall for their breadth of scripts that you can purchase rather cheaply.

No one book will give you everything you need, so I recommend sitting in a bookstore and perusing as many books as possible to see which one fulfills some unconscious need today. Then, repeat the process several weeks later, because your unconscious needs will have changed.

For the best understanding of story as a whole, you can’t go wrong with Chris Vogler’s The Writer’s Journey. Using mythic structure, Vogler breaks down story into its key components and then contextualizes those concepts using popular movies. Knowing almost nothing about screenwriting, I wrote my first screenplay using these elements as a template.

To get more into the structure and execution of screenplays and plots, then Linda Cowgill’s The Art of Plotting is very good. Written very approachably, Cowgill goes through the fundamentals of a good plot (e.g., conflict, character, action) and helps you understand where your story may be faltering or be improved.

A little more into character and how character changes through the screenplay, Dara Marks’ Inside Story helps you understand the concept of theme, which will lead you to better understand the motivations of your characters. In a similar vein is Stanley Williams’ The Moral Premise, which examines how opposing forces within and between your characters will move them forward in your story and more importantly, make them much richer.

Somewhere between individual scenes and broader acts of a screenplay are sequences, which one of my instructors described as being equivalent to book chapters where a single idea is explored before moving to the next one. Paul Joseph Gulino’s Screenwriting: The Sequence Approach is your guide here, helping you pull your scenes together into the right order.

And the chief poobah of screenwriting books is Robert McKee’s Story. I was actually afraid of getting this book for quite some time as people warned me that reading it too early would make me too intimidated to keep writing. I can see where they were going, but it’s not that McKee’s writing is difficult to follow, it’s more that he talks about a huge variety of topics. Suddenly, you realize how many balls you’re juggling when you’re writing a screenplay.

Ellen Sandler’s The TV Writer’s Handbook is a great step-by-step, but you have to do the exercises to make it worth it. Pamela Douglas’s Writing The TV Drama Series is a little dated but still gives a fantastic overview of hour-long programs, spending the bulk of its time on how to break down and analyze a program, before it gets into actually writing an episode.

Scott Sedita’s The Eight Characters of Comedy is an interesting analysis of comedic archetypes in sitcoms. Written more from an actor’s perspective, it still offers valuable insights to the writer trying to understand or create characters. And finally, Peter Desberg and Jeffrey Davis’s Show Me The Funny offers amazing insights into how the minds of comedy writers work, but even more importantly, shows you that no two people will develop the same story from the same premise…so don’t sweat starting with cliché ideas.

That’s a lot for a first kick…I hope you find something in here to get you started.