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.

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.

Habits in Your Writing

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.

In screenwriting, it’s particularly easy to fall back into personal cliches. Habits ingrained in our minds from years of watching television and movies become hard to break. I groan every time I find myself writing “she purses her lips” or “she quirks an eyebrow” and yet I do it again and again.

The best solution? For me, it’s all in the observation. I try to observe how people act at their most emotional. Skepticism is almost never demonstrated with a quirked eyebrow, for example. That’s visual shorthand and does nothing to add depth to an emotion. Perhaps the character can display their skepticism by tripping up their action a little or even acting towards a back-up plan if they think the plan they’re skeptical about won’t work.

I’d love to hear others writers’ takes on their own habits and how they break them, so feel free to comment away!

“Sweded” Films and Screenwriting

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:

Finding Time to Write

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.)

Progress Report: August 15, 2008

Instead of getting down about unemployment this summer (Catch-22 style, I can’t afford the car I need for a job in a suburb void of public transportation), I’ve been working away at several writing projects. Here’s an update on what I’ve done:

• Polished my “Office” spec
• Submitted said spec to both the Warner Bros. Workshop and the ABC/Disney Writer’s fellowship
• Slowly progress through the first act of my “Pushing Daisies” spec (I’m putting that gal down for a few weeks)
• Reworked outline of my untitled romantic comedy spec feature and continued writing its first act
• Added several pages to the high-concept, puppet-driven, action-adventure-fantasy-family-dark-comedy-insert-genre-here spec feature. The one that is for some reason taking me a year to write. (Meanwhile in TV-land I’m pumping out 20 page days)
• Wrote short (15-page) film about a girl who sleeps with her gay best friend
• Wrote short (10-page) musical film about a puppeteer who must choose between his gal and his felt fatale… And yes, I wrote the cheesy pop score to go with it.
• Reworked outline for the script-that-shall-not-be-named (intended for my thesis film next year)

With all of these bits and pieces of works, it’s a little disappointing that I haven’t produced another finished product. My high-concept spec is nearing completion, though, and I hope to finish that and the “Pushing Daisies” spec with the few weeks I have left before school starts.

The Trials and Liberations of Writing for Animation

I have a little (just a little) experience writing scripts intended for animation. Last year, I spent one exhausting semester entirely tucked away in the animation wing of my school. For hours on end I was slumped over a lightboard drawing pencil tests or cuddled up to a Cintiq inking my After Effects composition components. After dedicating dozens of hours to 30-second shorts (that frankly kind of sucked), I came out of the experience with one important lesson: I love writing for animation.

Why? Writing for animation is so liberating, both technically and creatively. First of all, many animated films aren’t even written in prose, but rather are sketched out in rows and rows of storyboards and fine-tuned through animatics. Secondly, there is almost nothing you can’t write so long as it supports a good story.

Suddenly you aren’t bound by reality. Budget expenses for scene changes are vastly smaller (at least on the independent level) since all you really have to do is draw some new backgrounds. Special effects are built-in. Physics doesn’t even have to exist if you don’t want to.

Think of anything you’ve ever wanted to write for a short film but couldn’t because nobody on a short film budget would DARE shoot it. Now write that into an animation.

Of course, writing for animation has less of a practical value. Animation specs are hard to sell, whether in TV or Film, since most animation production companies hire from in-house. Still, it’s a great experience – especially on the indie level – and I would recommend anybody with a friend in animation school to give it a try.

That said, pencil testing and syncing lips for those scripts is not quite as fun when you have trouble drawing stick figures.

The First Rejection

I received my first rejection from the first screenplay competition I’ve ever entered (not that a screenplay was actually entered… just a treatment):

Thanks so much for submitting HOW I HATED TED to the January Screenwriters Lab. With regrets, I am writing to let you know that we did not select your project for the 2009 Feature Film Program Labs. The selection process was extremely competitive. Despite the wealth of original and intriguing material submitted, we had to be extremely selective about requesting the screenplays we felt were the best fit for the program.

Because of the large volume of submissions received, we are unable to give you individual feedback. We wish you all the best with moving your project forward and encourage you to consider submitting future work to the Program.

Weirdly, I feel like celebrating. It really is a first submission, and in some ways, my first rejection as somebody trying to screenwrite professionally. There will probably be many more rejections, but isn’t that the fun of this?

Ah well. I’m 21. Can’t expect to win the world over yet… Wish me luck next year!

Writing in the Suburbs

Ok, a little background info: I’m an entering senior at NYU but, because of a lack of funds stemming back several generations of Italian peasants, I’m back at home at a suburb in MA for the summer.

This creates a not-so-unique dilemma of: “What the hell do I write about?”

In New York City, or any metropolitan really, there is inspiration standing on every sidewalk, crawling in every cafe, and leaking from every poorly-drained subway station’s ceiling. But here in the suburbs?

Here in the suburbs, everyone seems to get up at the same time everyday for their blue-collared jobs. Everyone finishes their day with a nightcap at a sports bar. Everyone spends their weekends drunk at a party or their favorite “club,” which is more like a slightly nicer sports club than anything else. Most of all, sometimes when you’ve been living in the same place for 21 years and you’ve seen the same faces and heard the sam names, you being to think that you have everybody figured out.

I’m trying to learn to write whereever I am. Writing in New York is easy. After all, there are a million brilliant characters, courtesy of God (or Darwin?), waiting to be plagiarized into the plot of your next work. Every face you see has something new etched in its wrinkles, every name you hear seems to have a compelling story behind it. Of course, you have to deal with perilous traffic and dangerous-seeming streets late at night, but that is part of the excitement and the suspense.

Writing in the suburbs becomes a new sort of challenge. It requires one to imagine and inquire much more actively than in the city, where the stories and the insight seem to be worn on the sleeve of every neighborhood. Everyday, I have to look at everything and try to see it from a new angle. After over twenty years, you have to get creative.

Maybe I’ll watch the friendly dude at the grocery store bakery who always made the cheesiest yet most lovable cakes for my birthday and suddenly notice that he’s flirting with a 25-year-old blonde in front of his deli-meat-slinging wife. Or I might wake up one day and notice that the door to our downstairs closet is about 3/4ths the size of every other door in the house. Has it always been this size? When did it become different?

I know I’m about a bazillion years too young (as demonstrated by my use of “bazillion”) to be feeling jaded, but I really think suburban life does that to you in a strange way. It’s not the gritty, adversity-defying kind of jadedness one sees in the heart of urban squalor, but this sort of emptying of one’s imaginative capacity that comes with the reduncy of suburb life.

So maybe tomorrow I will write about another silly neighbor at another silly party, one who drinks until the world looks fun again.