Learning to write, one cliff at a time.
I had a busy semester shooting my thesis film and while I have been writing every day I seem to be in that “drawer full of outlines” position many writers complain on.
I’m working on finishing my spec feature and a spec pilot for a high concept dramatic comedy. Oh, and about fifty other “ideas” that I can’t seem to pin down. I’ll start writing about where I am so we can all see where I’m going wrong here.
I have a very short attention span with writing locations. I try to switch it up every week, but here’s a few go-to spots I always find myself returning to:
I need some new suggestions, so feel free to add on to the list in the comments.
Sometimes the answer to the most daunting writing problems are found in the simplest places. In my case, the short screenplay I am writing was lacking the most obvious thing in the world: a story arc.
I think my biggest problem is the fear of the cliche. Let’s face it, just because a character has an infinite combination of choices to make doesn’t mean they’re all viable as story-driving mechanisms. I often have my characters make unpredictable choices for the sake of being unpredictable, only to find I have done nothing to actually shape a story arc that will capture the reader/viewer.
I noticed this problem in a recent screening of Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist I went to at my school. The film was very enjoyable moment-to-moment, but it lacked a cohesive arc of character and plot development which left it feeling loosely strung together. Sollett’s talent as a director made the film feel nearly perfect as it was, yet I can see how any less of a director would have given us a movie whose story problems were too severe to recover from.
During Nick and Norah, there are several storylines competing (and not necessarily complimenting) each other, each of them starting and ending at random moments. This leads to several anticlimaxes as each story feels finished at different times than the others. At the final moments when everyone shows up at the concert they’ve been searching for, it feels like the movie had already finished ten minutes before because the storylines we cared about – the safety of the drunken friend, Nick and Norah’s romance, the finding of the band itself – had already been wrapped up. The overlapping of several story arcs felt awkward, and I think making them slightly more parralel or at least finding one story that would be the most important to be solved in the final scene would have made for a better movie.
Of course, I’m not a professional screenwriting and at this point can’t write a movie half as charming as this one… So take all of this with a grain of salt. As I have said many times, I’m just trying to hash all of this out.
I go into hiding for a few weeks and there’s comments on my post! Sorry to those who were sweet enough to stop and say hi… I’ll be much more doting as a blogger in the weeks to come, I swear!
On to today’s brief topic: Diablo Cody is my hero. And it has nothing to do with her writing (which I think is good). From her MySpace blog: (somewhat NSFW after jump)
Ok, many student and indie filmmakers find themselves writing projects they intend to direct. It took me a while to get the hang of balancing the concerns of a writer with the concerns of the director when they’re the same person, but eventually I found that the best way to deal with this was to simply separate the two.
When I sit down to write, I try to pretend that I have no idea who is going to produce it. This, of course, is sometimes impossible because I have to think about budgetary constraints, locations, actors, and crew… but for the most part, I like to pretend some anonymous d-bag I hate has given me whatever my real budget is and his girlfriend from college will be directing. (There’s a much more elaborate story I’ve concocted, which either proves I’m constantly a story-teller or I’m clinically insane.)
From there, I try to outline the script as if it were simply written on spec with a general budget in mind. I don’t think about who is going to play the characters, I don’t think about who is going to score the soundtrack, I just think about the story itself. Whatever serves the story best goes on the page. Whatever doesn’t, doesn’t.
The hard part comes when I switch hats to director. When you’ve poured hours and hours into a tight, 10-20 script and spent late nights making notes on everything from your character’s hometown to what he had for breakfast, it becomes difficult to let go of the writer in you. But it’s necessary. A director needs to be able to throw out the page and pursue something new depending on what he/she sees in rehearsal or on the set. To me, it’s important that they allow their actors to improvise to some extent and organically find their way through the script. A director should never utter the words, “But I what I was trying write was…” It doesn’t matter what you’re trying to write. What matters now is what shows up on frame after frame of celluloid.
One of my favorite blogs on screenwriting, Complications Ensue, had a post recently called “Why TV?” I found it an excellent defense of a medium people always trash. My favorite part of his defense is this paragraph:
I write TV because it is the dominant medium in our time. It is where the best stuff is being done. It is what the most people are tuning into. It is the biggest lever to move people’s hearts. If this were the 19th Century I would probably be a novelist, and this would be a diary. If this were the 17th Century I would be a playwright and this would be drunken rantings in a pub. If this were the 6th Century BC I would be a poet and this would be drunken rantings at a private dinner.
To me, the problem is that many critics of television don’t recognize it as a medium but rather an entirely autonomous entity. While there are certainly political factors that affect what sort of television is being produced (the “big studios” certainly have the most say), every art has at some point been patronized by an entity that may have business interests at heart. Michaelangelo was commissioned by the Church, Shakespeare commissioned by the crown, and every film ever made had to be paid for by somebody. I think the resistance to television is a resistance to the democratization of art, stemming from a mix of elitism and fear of art’s impact being diluted because of its accessibility.
Yet time and time again I hear from professors that our generation – the YouTube generation that grew up on cable television – is the most visually sophisticated yet. We can process images faster than our parents could, which allows (though certainly shouldn’t mandate) more complicated editing in film and more visually descriptive text in a screenplay. If this is the unwanted effect of television, I’m not sure what the world is looking for.
As one of my favorite XKCD comics illustrates, it's easy to fall into the same shtick again and again.
Every writer has his or her habits” I’m not talking about our physical writing habits, such as when or where we write, but rather the phrases and structures that reappear in our writing time after time. Some people would call this a “signature style,” but often these habits devolve into lazy fallback devices.
Anyone who has seen Be Kind, Rewind has heard the term “sweded,” which refers to a no-budget remake of a popular film. This post at 1000 Dollar Film discusses how one might be able to “swede” their own script.
My question is, does sweding have to be completed at the production phase? Why not write your high-concept script with the swede already in mind. To me, this seems like a great approach to writing for web content, which often plays up the no-budgety feel to appeal to the DIY crowd.
So maybe you should write the swede into your next short. Instead of writing about a spaceship, describe its cardboard exterior and the glimpse of your cat in the background. This would give more structure the “swede” since every element will be intentional rather than out of necessity. I certainly am going to give this a try.
And after all, didn’t Gondry have to script those swedes in the first place?
BONUS – An example of a YouTube swede:
I think at some point everyone in high school had that English instructor that gave them the “creative writing” exercises that come in big books of student activities that teaches like to turn to when they run out of ideas. I probably have a little more experience than some with these as I was always a member of a creative writing club in middle school and high school. The question always remains: Do these actually do anything?
As usual, the answer isn’t simple. For me, the exercises are too cheesy to call for any progress in writing on a thematic or even structural level. You write them too quickly and play to a gimmick: “You’re late for class and need to come up with a ridiculous excuse” or “Write about the last person that made you laugh.” Of course, some of them can be more profound (a mentor of mine gave our afterschool writing shindig the assignment to write about a second-hand item we own and discuss what we think the owner may have been like), but even these tend to lead the writer too much and teach them that being clever is the only thing necessary for good writing.
On the other hand, these exercises do serve the purpose that the teacher giving them to you usually intends: they get you writing and they get you thinking creatively. While some kids have notebooks of limericks from five years old on, most young students would never even think of creating an imaginitive text and thus need prompting. It allows children (and yes, even adults) to understand that the written word is not simply for informational purposes but can serve to reimagine and reexamine reality.
My verdict? Basically, I see writing exercises as something that should be used only for very targeted purposes. When tackling a new genre (say… screenwriting!) you may want to try some to get the hang of the format and other pecularities of that genre, but overall a “creative writing exercise” will probably do little or nothing to inspire ideas or improve you as a writer.
Of course, that’s not to say you shouldn’t exercise your writing. Write something original everyday and – more importantly – rewrite something everyday.
As my relative online silence might suggest, I have been a bit too busy to indulge in my usual blogging. I just moved back to New York for my final year of college and already I know that it will be very, very hard to ever leave here. In the midst of this big move (i.e. paring down my wardrobe into something that will fit in the trunk of my mother’s car), I found very little time to write at all.
This brings me to my main topic today: How do you find time to write when your day-to-day life gets hectic? Let’s face it, whether you’re a full-time wage slave, an at-home mom, or a college student, you’ve got a busy schedule just in getting your basic work done.
I have met a lot of people who have a fairly regular writing schedule. I admire their discipline, and when I have the time I try to emulate it, but for the most part my schedule is always filled and always changing. During the schoolyear, I leave my apartment at 7AM and don’t get back until after 11 almost every day of the week (yes, even weekends… that’s when I have student shoots.) Fitting in solid blocks of writing can be hard when you’re on the go.
My method is basically this: at all times, I have either my laptop or my notebook on me… sometimes both. When I have a long break (maybe an hour or two between classes or an extra half-hour after lunch) I will sit down with my laptop and pound out the pages of scripts. When I can’t get together enough time to at least finish a page or two at once, I whip out the notebook and start brainstorming on new story ideas or solutions for old story problems. In fact, my main purpose is to constantly keep myself thinking about story. Even if there is no pen in sight, I will often mentally brainstorm (thank God for my geeky database of a memory) and the jot down my ideas later.
This is by no means a perfect method. Often I feel like I am scrounging for time or forcing myself to write when the ideas aren’t there. I’ll go for weeks without writing a single page and then finish an entire short or spec in one day. Yet, overall, I find that this suits my style. The discipline necessary to keep this up may not be apparent to those who like timetables for everything in their day, but it is there. The key is to make sure every spare moment is a moment for writing.
Of course, in the short-term I like to schedule out writing sessions so that I might be able to fit 3-4 hour blocks in on days when my schedule is a little lighter. But there is no way I – or many of the writers I have met- could keep a long-term schedule unless they were out of school and living on trust funds. (You’d be surprised.)
