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Where does it come from?

April 12, 09 //
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That’s a question about creativity raised by the film “Starting Out in the Evening.” It follows an aging and mostly forgotten literary novelist who is forced from his routine when a young graduate student enters his life, ostensibly to research her thesis. It is a wooden and stilted film with some (mostly) unintentional awkward moments, though it does achieve a sort of grace by the end. The last thirty minutes are wonderful, and Frank Langella patiently builds a character, whom he proceeds to allow time to dismantle block by block.

I’m not a film critic, so I’ll stop with the analysis. What I should talk about is the subject…this is a film about the writing process, and, ultimately, the origins of creativity. Where does it come from? How do we channel it? The film doesn’t provide any real answers beyond the only one that someone who makes up stories can give: writing is just something you do.  Asking why and from whence is for critics and English teachers. What matters is the process, which is what this film dwells upon and also what makes it interesting for writers.

Roger Ebert seconds this notion of the naivite of interviewers who ask the same old questions for which novelists and screenwriters have no real answer beyond what they think might sound good in quotes. About the graduate student who is interviewing Langella’s character, Ebert notes:

Soon she is discovering what every interviewer learns from every novelist: He doesn’t know what anything in his books “stands for,” he doesn’t know where he gets his ideas, he doesn’t think anything is autobiographical, and he has no idea what his “message” is. I am no novelist, but I am a professional writer, and I know two things that interviewers never believe: (1) the Muse visits during, not before, the act of composition, and (2) the writer takes dictation from that place in his mind that knows what he should write next.

Ebert’s two statements offer some of the truest understanding of the process as it works for me. Viewers who aren’t writers might drift off, but this film will raise interesting questions for anyone who spends a large portion of their time making up stories, tapping the keyboard with a limited idea where they are going and little to guide them beyond the faith that a story will eventually reveal itself if you are true to your compulsion and if you hang on long enough.

Creating a sense of place in screenplays, fiction and comics

April 4, 09 //
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Any story needs a sense of place. This is what keeps a narrative from happening inside of a void. A sense of place is different from setting. Setting is merely a point on the globe. A backdrop. A sense of place has sights, sounds, smell, dirt that feels a certain way when crumbled in your hand, a specific color to the sunset.

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One exercise to develop your sense of place is to sit on a rotting log in the woods for four hours. The Oregon coastal rainforest is a perfect location.

Creating a sense of place is different in all three forms of writing that I do. In film, you’re leaving hints. In a script, you can’t overdo it on the description…a screenplay needs to be spare and have enough room for the director and producers to fill in the details for how they want this film to feel and look. You need to just hint at the sense of place. And you need to do it in one and two word bursts throughout the script. It’s hard to do. I’ve been working with a patient director who has helped me hack away everything extraneous from the screenplay. But through our conversations, I can tell that he is seeing much more than what I’ve put on the page…he’s filling out the vision for the film. That’s his job, not entirely mine, and as a screenwriter I need to remember that fact.

In fiction, the task of creating a sense of place falls entirely to the writer. There won’t be a production designer, a sound designer and a director of photography to help you color in the details. You need to taste the air that your characters breathe. You need to know the names of the flowers and hear the calls of the local birds. You need to know what it smells like after it rains or understand the way a dust storm leaves a dry rattle in the back of your throat (even if you fabricate these details via imagination). The way I try to create a sense of place in prose is through details. Sometimes I’m lucky enough to know the setting well enough and the details are conveniently on hand. I always order a field guide to the local flora and fauna for every place that I write about in ficiton. I’ll read the geological history. You need to know how the crust of the Earth was formed beneath the place that carries your story. All of this is challenging for opposite reasons from screenwriting. In both mediums, it’s difficult.

Now that I’m working on comics, I’m finding a new way to create a sense of place. While fiction is created by an individual and film by a team collaboration, comics seem to be a partnership. And the artist creates the tone and emotion from the sense of place that happens in a story, but it has to also resonate with the narrative. And it keys on the panel descriptions you give to the artist…these are words that will never be read by the audience…they will be interpreted by the artist and presented via his visual style. It’s tricky, and I’m not exactly sure how the process works yet, though I’m pleased with the results we have so far.

A sense of place is a foundation for any narrative. I don’t know how other writers develop their skills for creating a place for a story. For me, I think I cultivate this sensitivity through spending as much time in the natural world as I can. Like Thoreau, you’d do well to sit on an old stump in the woods for four hours and feel how the forest changes around you. Unfortunately, I haven’t been doing this nearly as much as I should lately. Life has a tendency to get in the way. But the sun is finally out in Oregon, and I know I’ll soon be packing a tarp into the woods to spend a night or two curled up next to a rotting log or on the edge of an alpine lake.

Story within a story

March 28, 09 //
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My daughter was watching a show on PBS about a dog who travels through time. It worked on multiple timelines with several threads weaving the overall narrative.  A pretty complex structure for a kid’s show, or so I thought. I paused by the television on my way to the kitchen for an espresso and she looked up at me and explained, “this story is happening inside another story.”

It was then that I realized how natural is the narrative concept of story within a story. My daughter, barely five, is hardly thrown by a complex narrative.

Story within a story, as a device, is as old as storytelling itself. Take The Arabian Nights and Sheherazade’s desperate bid to prolong her life serving as a framework for a string of tales. Take Guillermo Arriaga’s multi-threaded storytelling in Amores Perros and Babel. Take the picaresque collection of tales in Big Fish, each exaggerated story serving the greater narrative about a complex father-son dynamic. Or consider the simple story within a story told by Tom Hanks in Charlie Wilson’s War that amounted to the finest moment in that film: he tells the story of how he became involved in politics as a young boy, ending the tale with, “And that’s the day I fell in love with America.”

The technique is used so often in film and fiction that it’s hardly original or distinctive. It can be done well, as in Joseph Conrad’s Youth, which is a story within a story delivered around pints of beer by a sailor in a pub. Or it can be as clumsy and hamfisted as the oft-maligned flashback. But a flashback is just another form of story within a story, an if you do it well, nobody will complain.

Way back in grad school, I was taught that story within a story was a useful technique that could help you advance a narrative. The instructors in Columbia College Chicago’s fiction program used an exercise called the “steeple chase.” Basically, you’d take a short story or novel excerpt and put it through the ringer, telling parts in first person, parts in second, switching narrators and tense, or telling part of it as a letter or newspaper article. We were also required to tell part of the narrative as a story within a story. Often it served the purpose of unsticking a stuck narrative. So if you’ve got a novel or script that you can’t seem to bear to finish, try having a character tell a story within a story, or launch into some tangent, and see what effect it has on the narrative…it might just set things into motion again.

Whatever the case, it’s a natural device in storytelling…so inherent to the art that it’s simple for even a five year old to grasp.

Telling stories for free or profit

March 18, 09 //
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How do you make money telling stories? Thousands of MFA students ask themselves that question, usually starting a few weeks after graduation when reality sets in and you find out the world isn’t really that much different than it was when you were sitting in a circle reading from a fistful of laser paper. You’ve got a degree, now what? Who’s going to read your stuff  without the classroom structure providing you with an audience?

You’ve got two options. Give it away for free, or follow the traditional market models. The power of the Web allows the former to happen rather easily. But the latter is still the best way to turn your efforts into cash money.

I’ve now earned a modest amount of remuneration for making stuff up. Certainly not enough to keep the mortgage paid. And as a Web professional, I’m all for the concept barrier-free communication. Everything I do at my day job is designed to make it easier to access information. And this is at odds with the whole notion of publishing. It’s hard to access novels…you have to walk to the store and fork over twenty bucks, or sit at home and wait for the box from Amazon. So the notion of paying for text is ridiculous. Every word I’ve ever written, which is by now numbering in the millions, would fit on a thumb drive and could be sent around the world in seconds from my iPhone.

But as a writer, I also want to get paid for the years I’ve invested in creating that text.

A part of me believes it’s inevitable that writers, novelists in particular, will be giving the goods away for free online, using sites like Scribd. Even publishers are starting to offer free content on Scribd and elsewhere, trying to figure out what the business model will be.

But my friend Mort Castle, with his razor wit and boundless optimism, doesn’t seem to think that is such a good idea.  He’ll proceed as before on his 40-year quest to be an overnight success. Few writers work at it harder than Mort does.

But is the role of the publisher changing in a world of open communication? As these fireworks at SXSW demonstrate, publishers are being forced to face this question directly. I think the guy from Penguin makes a solid point when he proclaims the importance of the filter. That’s always been the role of the publisher and agent: find the gem in the slush, make it easily accessible to the masses. In essence, readers pay publishers to find the best stuff. Won’t a publisher’s role become even more vital in a world where choice is expanding?

Still, the sticky question is how to capture a profit when shelf space and distribution is now free. Some projects would never have existed if it weren’t for the Web, these the sorts of blog-to-book scenarios that writers dream about manufacturing.

Do you wait for a business model, or do you make one? Or do you just experiment? Or do you just stick to the traditional models like Mort? For now, I’m still sending manuscripts to New York in manila envelopes. Though I’ve noticed that agents in the traditional book biz are even changing, with requests for PDFs or Word versions to load onto Kindles increasing. As for LA, I’ve never printed and sent an actual screenplay manuscript…it’s all been PDF (and a scanned release form) since I’ve gotten involved.

But I’m also giving it away. Next week I’m launching a Web comic, an online graphic novel called ‘Los Refugiados,’ with artist Santiago Uceda. We’ve kicked around adding a donate button. We hope someone will recognize our brilliance in monetary form. But we have no real business model.

In the end, telling stories is something that humans do. If the market didn’t exist, it would still happen. If the Web weren’t around, we’d sit around the fire and spin yarns or scratch it into the walls of our caves.

But it sure would be nice to get paid for it.

Writing for the budget

November 4, 08 //
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When you first start writing scripts, one of the great liberating experiences is the ability to start a scene with something like this:

EXT. PARIS STREET – AFTERNOON

Smith steps to the curb and hails a cab...

And then, you can follow up with the next scene, with a quantum leap:

EXT. SEASIDE CAFE, HAVANA – MORNING

Pilar sits across from Valencia...

It gives you a sense of freedom as a writer to be able to jump from one location to another. After all, you just need to type the name of the place in your scene heading and you’re there. A leap from Anchorage to Albequerque is only a matter of characters on the keyboard. This is profound, because most of us spend a huge portion of our lives hunched over a keyboard in some dingy office or in the corner of a coffee shop. Maybe we hang out on the fifth floor of the library next to a stack of books nobody reads. To be able to leap around the globe via our narratives is one of the attractions of this pursuit.

But what I’m learning now is that such freedom can be a dangerous thing. Producers read scripts differently than we do as writers. When they see a location change, numbers start to click in their heads. A change in the setting, and the addition of numerous locations, can inflate the budget in less time than it takes you to complete a scene heading.

I’m rewriting a script now with budget and locations in mind. I’m eliminating action sequences and removing an entire series of scenes that take place two thousand miles away form the main center of action. I’m also collapsing characters, combining several similar roles into a single character to reduce the casting costs. A producer said that I could take the script in two directions: a big budget action film, or a character-driven drama. Their company specializes in the latter. I was presented with a challenge: rewrite the script to reduce the cost of making this film, and they’ll consider an option.

The pragmatic requirements of filmmaking are quite different from, say, novels where you’re only limited by your own imagination. When you set a scene in Cairo, that won’t require you to send the second unit to Africa to get b-roll of the pyramids. Or you don’t have to worry about the fact that a scene set in Havana becomes problematic if much of the cast and crew is made up Americans, who are forbidden to travel there by the knuckleheaded blowholes in Washington.

I’m also finding that it’s not always a matter of collapsing and contracting your script. Sometimes you’ll be called upon to increase a role, attracting a different caliber (and more expensive) level of talent. On this same project, I’m removing minor characters and increasing the visibility and prominence the four lead roles so that they can try to attract four major actors for these key parts instead of just one or two.

Writing for a budget is nothing I’ve ever had to consider doing before, writing as I have mostly fiction. My first two scripts featured international locations. My third script was set entirely within forty miles of where I live, my thinking being that this script might make a nice independent project someday, or at least attract interest from different types of production companies looking for smaller budget films.

Hurricane Lili: Chapter One

June 18, 08 //
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SUN-SPARKLE ON whitecaps, stiff onshore breeze pushing the smell of rotting kelp and turtle grass off of the beach, massing clouds on the horizon dark and promising rain: this was the backdrop to the girl on the day that things changed. I watched her over the top of my book and over the rims of my sunglasses. The instant that I spotted her I was possessed: my mind shifted, my heart warped. I knew I was now a different person, capable of anything, perhaps even murder.

The girl was pale with a slight, orange-pink cast that hinted at tanning creams and sun lamps. Tourist. Judging from her color, she was likely on her second full day in the sun after a cautious first day using a high-number sun block. You acquire skills after being in the Keys awhile: reading water, reading sky, reading skin.

She paced the beach before me, shadowing a child of less than two who scampered ahead and occasionally paused to squat on fat thighs and grasp shells from the coral sand. The mother, still a girl herself, wore a blue floral-print bikini—her exquisite hips decked in a wrap of diaphanous cloth. I studied her in profile as she moved along the edge of the water with the final trailing of the waves kissing her feet in a way that made me jealous. I watched the striations in her thighs appear for an instant as she stepped down on the ball of her foot. I studied the tensing of her calves. My eyes lingered on her absorbingly wrapped rear, the slight paunch of a belly in an otherwise muscled midsection (sit ups/appetite), the confidence evident in her posture where the roundness of her butt curved in toward her spine, the muscle tone in her shoulder appearing as she raised an arm to shade her eyes, turning her head to scan the surf where her husband swam between distant buoys, powering through the growing chop. She wore an interesting collection of bracelets on each wrist made from woven cloth, copper, bone and plastic beads. Her hair might be brownish in the winter, but now it was bleached, lightening at the ends to match the pale tone of the sand. Her chin was strong and her nose blunt. I couldn’t see her eyes for her mirrored sunglasses, but I imagined them green and feline—maybe they’d be her most striking feature if you caught a glimpse of her across a crowded room.

This might seem obsessive, but I’m just being honest. I admit to relishing the image of every woman I see. The practice often leads to a brief fantasy and on occasion to action and a lame pass. In rare instances, a conversation is sparked. But on the whole it remains pure naturalistic appreciation, though it does serve a practical purpose. Since the irregularities of my failing heart began keeping me awake nights, I started reflecting on the details of some woman recently studied. As I lie in bed, I mentally trace the graceful arc of flesh, the painted toenail, the strong chin under a straw hat or the faint blue line of a vein on the back of a leg. Every detail I can muster is turned over in my head, my mind’s eye lingering, of course, on the more sensual details. This practice quickens and studies my pulse, eventually quieting the arrhythmic thumping in my temples that renders sleep impossible. My doctor has insisted that the requisite heart surgery isn’t a wise option given the combined limitations of Medicaid, my genetics, and years of abuse by caustic substances. So I’ve been left with bananas, brisk walks, beta blockers and ACE inhibitors, the shunning of cigarettes and booze in hopes of prolonging my stay in this world. I don’t have much to go on, so I figure I should cling to whatever helps.

This particular young woman should have fueled a dozen nights of slumber, but instead the moment I spotted her my arrhythmia, that irregular rattle-clatter in my ribcage, actually began to worsen. The storm clouds massed beyond her and the onshore breeze gusted. It was either the foreshadowing of some sort of disaster or I was falling immediately in love, these two phenomena symptomatically similar and often one in the same. Nothing good will come of this, Jake, old boy, my sixth sense told me, Bury your head in your book and forget her.

But I continued watching her closely, feeling like a stalker, a voyeur, an old creep. We were alone on the gorgeous stretch of beach, the threat of a big storm keeping the less adventurous (or wiser) tourists away. It was just me, the girl and the toddler on this quarter-mile ribbon of pale sand hemmed by the lush green of the hardwood hammock on one side and the vast turquoise of the Atlantic on the other. Her husband splashed from buoy to buoy on the horizon, but he seemed as remote as a ship out beyond the reef. Maybe the sense of foreboding was only a product of the winds that had spun out of Africa to cause the mild tropical depression that was threatening to grow into something grander and less hospitable, swirling now a mere hundred miles off Cuba.

I forced my head down into the book again—it was a dense Russian novel, the kind that demands your full powers of concentration to understand that the two main characters are variously called Vanya, Alyosha, Alexeichik,Vanka, Lyoshenka, Ivan, Alyoshechka, Lyosha and so on. I was having trouble keeping it all straight. I heard a gull overhead and also the hiss of the breeze gusting through the sea oats behind me.

Something pulled my head up. Fate, maybe. I lowered my novel and studied the girl as she stood with her back to me, her toes in the water, her legs spread shoulder-width, her hand raised to shade her eyes. She gazed at the shrinking form of her husband, who was now swimming straight out toward the reef. Maybe I was in luck…wasn’t there some sort of current that might sweep him off to the Dutch Antilles, leaving me to attend to this young woman? I felt the seeds of a fantasy forming. I couldn’t be sure, but I sensed from the woman’s posture that she wasn’t all too concerned about the fellow’s safety. A troubled marriage, surely. My eyes lingered. From this view I was free to study the shape of her backside in detail.

But then I glanced away just for a moment to catch sight of the toddler teetering a dozen yards down the beach. The child was now up to her knees in the water and heading deeper. A largish wave rolled toward her. I stared openmouthed for an instant, heart plunging with the sort of terror only a parent can know.

Then I reacted.

Impulse wrenched me from my supine position and carried me the twenty yards to the child at a dead run. I reached her just as the wave bowled her over, its crest well above her head. I plucked her from the froth and lifted her high out of the water. She squealed, making a face at the taste of the brine.

At the sound of the kid’s voice, the mother rushed to my side. I felt her hand on my shoulder and I smelled her sun-bleached hair. My book floated at my feet, and my heart pounded an amplified version of its imperfect rhythm, blood rushing past my temples, my breathing labored. The child was heavy and wriggling, but I held her up, my fingers sinking into the plush flesh of her midsection. Her softness in my hands was delightful, recalling memories of my Lili. But I felt the permanent sense of calamity that enshrouds every parent; worry is one of the less savory sensations of parenthood, and it is one that I had tried so hard to mute in recent years through geographical separation, not to mention booze and chemical substances.

“My God. Thank you,” the woman said.

I handed the child over and smiled, though my hands trembled. She clutched the girl to her breast and kissed her on the forehead.

“I just turned away for a second and she took off,” she said.

“I know how they can slip away.”

“Horrible. I’m just a horrible mother…”

“Don’t be ridiculous. She’s fine…see.”

“Thank you. Thank you.” She pursed her lips and kissed the child. She touched my shoulder leaving a warm imprint. The kid whimpered and wiped her face with her palms.

“Yuck, Mommy,” the toddler said.

I wanted to introduce myself, but I couldn’t find any words. I shook both from my proximity to this gorgeous creature and the adrenaline of the rescue. I nodded, smiled again stupidly, then bent down to retrieve my soaked book from where it bobbed in the surf (stealing a glance at the taper of the mother’s ankles as I did so) and then walked back to my towel wondering how my wrecked body had managed to cross that stretch of beach so quickly. The scent of her hair and her salt-tinged skin still saturated my senses. I smiled at the notion of my parental instincts remaining intact despite years of numbing. Even now, with my heart beginning to fail, I could still race to the rescue of a toddler. I am worth something. Back when my Lili was small, I had heard all the horror stories of toddlers drowning in a five-gallon bucket or a neighbor’s play pool. And here I had just plucked a child away from salty peril. I felt…almost heroic.

I settled back down on my towel. The mother walked up the beach, clutching the squirming child. She turned her head toward her husband: he still stroked through the waves in Olympic fashion. Surely he would soon tire and drown, wouldn’t he? The kid wriggled in her arms. She glanced back in my direction and caught my stare. Her mouth was open, her face blank, haunted.

I pretended to read, but I felt a drama unfolding as the husband turned and headed in toward shore. The woman paced faster as I stared over the top of my soggy book. Soon the husband emerged from the surf, oblivious to what had happened. The water rolled off of his form like rain from an imitation Greek marble. His youth and well-formed shape made me feel inadequate. I was lean for my age and had recently grown fitter at the urgings of my doctor, but aside from the permanent quality of my tan I didn’t compare favorably with this fellow. He had shoulder-length, straw-colored hair and pleasant, almost feminine features. The young mother trotted up to him, proffering the toddler, whom he hoisted above his head.

I was saddened by the sight of the reunion of this handsome family, feeling ridiculous for ogling the girl. My earlier heroism evaporated, and I returned to being a fading beach bum, a failed writer, a lousy husband and a disastrous father on hospice in the tropics, waiting to die in paradise. My earlier foreboding intensified. It was as if I sensed that I would soon want to rip this little family apart.

The young woman gestured with her hands, making the motion of grasping the child and then pointing my way. The husband regarded me for a second, then he looked back to the woman said something in a raised voice. I couldn’t quite make it out. The girl shook her head. She turned away from him. She folded her arms tightly across her breasts and tucked her head. I heard her voice, and it sounded like she was sobbing. He trotted after her, the child bouncing on his shoulders. She stopped and knelt in the sand. He stood over her. There were more words, and he shouted now. She turned then, lashing out at him. She beat his thigh with her fists. Holding onto the child with one hand, he grabbed her arm with the other and pulled her to her feet with a powerful jerk. He shook her. Even from this distance I saw the indentation his thumb was making in the flesh of her upper arm. He shook her some more so that her head bounced back and forth. He released her and she stumbled. The child began to cry.

She staggered away from him and walked a few yards to the edge of the water, folding her arms again and looking out at the massing towers of clouds.

I watched a moment longer and then put my head down.

“You fucker,” I mumbled, the curse directed at the muscle-bound husband, but also at myself. You might be somewhat heroic when it comes to toddlers and knee-high waves, but when you see some fellow roughing up a girl, you whither.

I thumbed through the soggy pages of my novel, finally finding where I’d left off, squinting at the typeface. The print from the reverse side showed through the wet paper, but by concentrating I was able to now discern that Ivan was also Vanya and Vanka, and that his brother Alexie was also Lyoshenka and Alyosha. When I looked up a few minutes later, the family was gone. But the sense of impending darkness lingered on the empty beach. The storm clouds had thickened and darkened, and now a few fat raindrops fell with dull plops on the coral sand.

If you’re interested in reading the full manuscript of Hurricane Lili, drop me a note at dave[at]301media[dot]com.

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