Middlebrow
I'm not highbrow. That's a fact and one that I'm entirely comfortable with. It does mean, however, that I have to interpret some of the lectures. That's also fine. It makes it clear to me exactly what I should have read prior to now and I find that interesting.
I'm not lowbrow either. I'm pretty sure that's also fact. I like to think I appreciate the complex dick and fart jokes as well as the simpler variety. I'm joking of course. It's rare to find a complicated dick joke or a complicated fart joke.
After the core lecture this week I did find out that I'm not even close to being the only middlebrow member of the group. So that made me feel better.
Script Exercise (WSF Ch.1)
Script exercise from the end of chapter 1. This exercise relates to the short film Life Lessons released as part of New York Stories.
1. Identify the underlying concept of the film.
The film is the story an artist and his assistant who have just come to the end of a relationship. The events of the film show how their breakup has affected both of their lives and the work of the artist.
2. Identify the main conflict for the protagonist.
The main protagonist in the story is the artist played by Nick Nolte. For the duration of the film we are lead to believe that he wants to rebuild his relationship with the assistant or at the very least take care of her. His art and the gradual removal of his "artists block" the more she hurts him appears to matter less to him than having the girl accept his care. The main thing standing in the way of his relationship with the girl is his erratic behaviour. At the end of the film, when he offers another girl the job of the assistant, we are presented with the idea that the destruction of his relationship with his assistant was merely a tool in his "artistic process". The fact that he's recruiting a new one leads us to believe that he may have done it in the past and his earlier mentioning of his four failed marriages makes sense in this new context. What he really wants is to continue to be a successful artist.
3. Jot down a few sentences describing the basic story conflict.
The assistant tells the artist she wants to break up.
The artist attempts to win back the assistant.
The assistant rejects the artist.
The artist pursues the assistant with greater intensity and guile.
The assistant still rejects the artist.
The assistant taunts the artist.
The artist realises he's lost the power in the situation.
The artist fails to stop the assistant leaving.
The artist gets a new assistant.
People Watching
Okay I'm sure you know this but people watching is the single most entertaining sport on the planet. Sitting in a cafe and watching people is the closest you're going to come to knowing 99.9% of them. You can make this even more useful and fun by taking a friend with you. Rather than just playing voyeur you can bounce off each other and come up with some ideas you'd never have come up with on your own. The fact it's become a game makes you much less self-conscious about staring in the first place. Just remember to write down what you observe.
Things we saw this weekend...
- Two people who clearly got on really well. He leaned in when asking her what kind of coffee she wanted. They shared carrying the shopping bags. They constantly made eye contact and smiled at each other.
- A family of three (mother, father and son) who went out of their way to make conversation. The woman's body language was open to her son and closed to the father who was hunched over the table desperately trying to listen in.
- A couple on the rocks. She leaned forward, he leaned back. He never smiled at her. He flirted with the waitress. They used a lot of aggressive hand gestures when talking.
- A family who have gone out of their way to dress and style their kids as "tv trendy". The children looked really uncomfortable in their get up. The wife did her best to send her husband and kids away while she had coffee with her friends.
Other people are ready made characters!
Editing Others
There's no two ways about it. I like editing other people's work far more than I like editing my own. Perhaps it's because their writing style is sufficiently different from mine that I can better see the sentence structure. Maybe it's the fact that I've got no familiarity with the words or the story and the pleasure comes from having greater objectivity. Whatever it is, the fact remains. I not only prefer editing other people's work, I find it easier too.
I also think you can learn a lot from it. Paying attention to the process you go through can help to highlight the order in which you examine the various components. This translates across to editing your own work. When editing a story you've written the process of examining the prose is forced back into your subconscious by your familiarity with your own work. So... The more aware you are of the process, the better you will become at editing your own work and you'll find it easier to detach yourself from even the most personal of your stories.
Having attempted to review/edit around seven short stories and three novel chapters I've realised the following...
- I'm still very much a beginner at this writing lark.
- I find it very difficult to read through an entire story before going back and reviewing it. If I spot something that I want to comment on I prefer to do it then and there. This may disrupt the flow of the story but if I was reading it as a published piece the issue would disrupt it then as well.
- Looking at other people's sentences is a great way to learn to be efficient with your words. You can practice removing those unnecessaries without getting all precious about how it will ruin your magnum opus. When you see how much better someone else's work is without all those extra words you'll be a lot more comfortable removing them from your own.
- The fact you know so little about the story means you don't have all the information (obviously...). This means you've got a much greater awareness of what information you're lacking at any given point in the story. This is especially true when it comes to attaching dialogue to characters.
That's about all I can come up with for now. There were a couple of other ideas floating around in my head but they didn't translate to the typed word. I can only hope they're now ingrained in my subconscious and make me a better writer!
Oh yes. One more thing. You get to see other people's clever turns of phrase and fancy sentence structures... and you can commandeer them and bastardise them for your own purposes! Sad, slightly evil perhaps, but true.
Oh I See
In order to make a smart link work I need to link to one of the supported sites...
Like the Lives of Others page on IMDB.
Maybe?
Tough Homework
Tonight's homework from the script writing module is to write a one page outline for a ten minute film we'd like to work on. At first I was really pleased with the task but now I'm actually trying to decide on an idea I'm finding it really difficult. I've been going through my story ideas and those of stories I've written in the past. The problem I'm having isn't that my prose isn't visual, rather that I'm not sure how to get enough of my idea across without resorting to hideous amounts of dialogue. This is hard. But also quite awesome.
House Style (Pt1)
I felt a little foolish last night. The lecturer asked if anyone had a house style. I spoke up (no one else seemed like they were going to) and said that I pretty much always wrote in the first person present tense. She looked at me as if expecting more and I was rather embarassed that, on the spot, I couldn't expand further. Thinking about it now there is more to the choice. There's also more to say about my style of writing beyond just "I like to write in the first person present tense".
I've always said that my choice of perspective lies in the way that I think about my writing. My influences have always been cinematic rather than literary and I always visualise the scenes I'm writing. I know exactly how they'd look if I was filming them and I usually see a scene through my main characters eyes. I do recognise this as a weakness because it means I'm rarely looking at my character from the outside and this makes it harder to be objective in my feelings towards them.
I don't monologue much. I prefer to let a character's actions and interactions speak for them. This makes sense to me since in real life I (personally) rarely monologue (especially internally) except when I'm really drunk. This leads me into the next reason I like the first person. Unless our characters are telepathic, we don't have access to their thoughts. This forces us to think about our description in a different way. No longer are we simply describing appearance and actions but that description has to convey a character's motivations at the time.
For the most part I like to have a clear image of what my characters look like, how they move and how they dress. I think having an image of a character is important in order to build a relationship with with them, both for the author and for the reader. The picture on the cover of a book can only go so far. As shallow as it may seem a person's appearance is (most of the time) the first way we get to know a person. I do my best to integrate description into the action though so as not to interupt the flow.
The final reason (for now) that I write in the way I do is I feel it gives me a sense of greater immediacy and makes the piece a lot more personal. I feel much more comfortable getting into the head of a character when I "am them". I also tend to write in short sentences interspersed with longer ones that I try to give a degree of rhythm. On the rare occasion I'm able to translate my thoughts directly into intelligible sentences this seems to be how they come out. I feel the shorter sentences also add to the immediacy.
...That and I just plain like the style.
As an aside, after I'd spoken up, our course leader did say that agents and publishers generally don't like reading things in the first person present tense...
On Character
Tonight's session was on characterisation and gave me a lot more to think about. When I write I tend to think of characters in terms of their current actions. I consider their feelings at points I know their emotions should be running high. I consider their past when I think back-story is relevant.
I have start considering my characters in greater detail. I need to know what they've done, what they're doing and what they plan to do. I need to know how they felt, how they feel and how they might feel. I need for them to have motivations that are realistic and are reflected or opposed by other characters. I need the actions and the motivations to balance between the opposing forces in the story. More than anything I need to start looking at my characters from the outside in order to judge them objectively.
I need to consider all this and think how it affects the characters actions and feelings now. I guess this will all go in the plan I'm going to work on over the next week. Lots to do!
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The Anti-Rant
What follows is a rant I sent to a couple of friends last night.
"Ugh... I had to send it somewhere. I did my best to incorporate your comments and make it better but this MA is taking literally all my time. I sent it off anyway since I felt the need to get a rejection from somewhere while I lose myself in a 3000 word essay about my influences and how they've affected my writing practice (ugh again...). I really thought I was going to have more time for everything but my life is now lost in work, textbooks, novels, scripts, attempts to fit in prose, sleeping, editing friend's work. All the while I'm really feeling like it's taking me down one peg at a time and I'm losing confidence. I just feeling really lowbrow right now... which most of the time would be just fine... I just sent off a description of a 10 minute film I want to use for my script coursework and it really does feel genuinely awful. The images and concepts that felt so good in my head the last few days just feel really stark and obvious now I've tried to plan a story around them. I'm just in ideas crisis... Aaaargh. Yes. Stopping."
Getting that stuff off my chest did feel really good but this morning I was still feeling quite down. Two things picked me up. The first was the cookies. We've got a new tradition at work (we've done it twice). After pay day we have a bake off. This month we baked cookies. We ended up with seven different batches! The second thing that cheered me up was messages from friends. Yes sending rants like this out is kind of childish and kind of attention seeking but if people don't know how you're feeling then they can't offer support and we all need support. Sometimes all you need is someone else to pick you up a little to give you the distance you need to actually think about why you're feeling the way you do and think about how you can go about changing it.
Thinking about the essay now... I think I got myself tangled up in some idea of the technical side of writing that I thought I didn't have a clue about. The thing is, I do know what has influenced me and (as a friend reminded me) I am passionate about those things. I write about things that make me feel something. My influences are all things that have evoked strong feelings. All I can do is talk about how things make me feel and how this has affected my writing. Perhaps something more technical will come out of the exercise but if it doesn't then it's not something I should allow myself to worry about. You can't write about what's not there and true passion can't be faked.