My Favorite Places to Write

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:

• Think Cafe – This is your quintessential Greenwich Village coffee shop. Any NYU kid will tell you there’s nothing like a bunch of snarky hipsters serving you coffee to get those creative juices flowing. In a country that seems to be founded on customer service, it’s strangely refreshing to have a dude in Rivers Cuomo glasses yell “Hey, chick in the hat! You forgot to sign the fuckin’ receipt!”
• Aroma Cafe – Nestled not-so-comfortably on Houston and Mercer, this place has THE best sandwiches… At least when they haven’t run out of bread, which happens more than you think.
• Washington Square Park – Before renovations started, the center of Washington Square Park was my favorite place to bring a charged laptop and bask in the original lighting fixture of the cinema of life. Plus, the drunken hobos singing Bob Dylan while strumming on out-of-tune guitars make for the perfect background music. Now that the center of the park is closed I still sometimes sit on the benches around the perimeter, but the overhead trees make for a lot of pigeon excrement-dodging that somewhat distract me from the writing process.
• My bed – Sometimes you just need to cozy up with a hot cocoa and a notepad somewhere where you feel perfectly safe. And sometimes you don’t have enough money in your bank account for that $5 frappi-latte-cappu-expresso-ccina you need to buy to sit at a cafe without glares.
• The library – Or, I should say, ANY library. It’s nice to have books around you to peruse for research, ideas, or creative distractions.
• The train – Back when I had an hour-and-a-half commute to my summer job, I made the miraculous discovery that the motion sickness that prevented me from reading strangely didn’t occur when I wrote. I’m sure there’s some kind of sensible explanation for this, but I like to think the powers that be are dropping a hint.
• Campus Starbucks – There’s free wireless for students, OK?

I need some new suggestions, so feel free to add on to the list in the comments.

The Arc

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.

Diablo Cody is My Hero (for being a BAMF)

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)

Writing to Direct

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.