advice/writing
Patricia Highsmith,
Ursula K. Le Guin,
Mary Karr,
Anne Lamott,
David Foster Wallace,
Martin Amis,
Vijay Prashad,
Annie Dillard,
Syd Field
tips
12/18/60
The muse doesn’t come when you beckon. She comes when you’ve tried all day to get something right, and you’re tired and about to go to bed—and then you stay up. She comes when you’ve lost your love. She touches you, she touches your shoulder, and then you know you’re not alone after all.
[...] you don't get any sense of the infinity of choices that were made in the text until you start trying to reproduce them. [...]
his suggestion that students try to imitate a page of text word for word (from memory) to learn how to write like the author, so you can feel your muscles working to achieve the same effect
A good opener, first and foremost, fails to repel. Right? So it's interesting and engaging. It lays out the terms of the argument, and, in my opinion, should also in some way imply the stakes. Right? Not only am I right, but in any piece of writing there's a tertiary argument: why should you spend your time writing this? right? "so here's why the following issue might be important, useful, practical." I would think that if one did it deftly, one could in a one-paragraph opening grab the reader, state the terms of the argument, and state the motivation for the argument. I imagine most good argumentative stuff that I've read, you could boil that down to the opener.
[...] In order for your sentences not to make the reader's eyes glaze over, you can't simply use the same core set of words, particularly important nouns and verbs, over and over again. You have to have synonyms at your fingertips and alternative constructions at your fingertips. And usually, though not in the sense of memorizing vocab words like we were kids, but having a larger vocabulary is usually the best way to do that. The best. having a good vocabulary ups the chances that we're going to be able to know the right word, even if that's the plainest word that will do and to achieve some kind of elegant variation, which I am kind of a fiend for.
Somewhere in the first five minutes of a well-structured screenplay , someone (usually not the main character) will pose a question or make a statement (usually to the main character) that is the theme of the movie. "Be careful what you wish for," this person will say or "Pride goeth before a fall" or "Family is more important than money." It won't be this obvious, it will be conversational, an offhand remark that the main character doesn't quite get at the moment — but which will have far-reaching and meaningful impact later.
This statement is the movie's thematic premise.
In many ways a good screenplay is an argument posed by the screenwriter, the pros and cons of living a particular kind of life, or pursuing a particular goal. Is a behavior, dream, or goal worth it? Or is it false? What is more important, wealth or happiness?
But this can also go for little fixes of minor characters or subplots in a script that's not working. Are these characters motivated by primal drives? It 's another way of saying: Are these characters acting like recognizable human beings? At their core, they must be. Or else you are not addressing primal issues.
Let's say you have a high-falutin' concept: stockbrokers rigging the international bond market. Fine. All very interesting. But at its core, no matter what the plot is, by making each character's desire more primal, that plot is grounded in a reality that everyone can understand — suddenly it's not about stockbrokers, it's about human beings trying to survive.
Waldo Salt believed in capturing “the truth” of the characters in a story. I had the good fortune of having several conversations with Waldo, and he was not only an extraordinary writer, but an extraordinary person. We talked about the craft of screenwriting a lot, and Waldo told me that he believed the character’s need (the dramatic need—what the character wants to win, gain, or achieve) determines the dramatic structure. His words resonated with me immediately, and I shared with him that I had recently come to the same understanding while I was analyzing Woody Allen’s Annie Hall: The character’s need determines the creative choices he/she makes during the screenplay, and gaining clarity about that need allows you to be more complex, more dimensional, in your character portrayal.
It was a powerful moment for both of us as we sat in an unspoken glow of communication that was more powerful than words, and it led to a long and passionate discussion about capturing “the truth of the human condition” in a screenplay. The key to a successful screenplay, Waldo emphasized, was preparing the material. Dialogue, he said, is “perishable,” because the actor can always improvise lines to make something work. But, he added forcefully, the character’s dramatic need is sacrosanct. That cannot be changed, because it holds the entire story in place. Putting words down on paper, he said, is the easiest part of the screenwriting process; it is the visual conception of the story that takes so long. And he quoted Picasso: “Art is the elimination of the unnecessary.”
Reading it from this perspective, I saw four things, four essential qualities that seemed to go into the making of good characters: (1), the characters have a strong and defined dramatic need; (2), they have an individual point of view; (3), they personify an attitude; and (4), they go through some kind of change, or transformation.
Those four elements, those four qualities, make up good character. Using that as a starting point, I saw that every main, or major, character has a strong dramatic need. Dramatic need is defined as what your main characters want to win, gain, get, or achieve during the course of your screenplay. The dramatic need is what drives your characters through the story line. It is their purpose, their mission, their motivation, driving them through the narrative action of the story line.
One of Henry James’s theories is termed the Theory of Illumination. James said that if your character occupies the center of a circle and all the other characters he interacts with surround him, then each time a character interacts with the main character, the other characters can reveal, or illuminate, different aspects of the main character. The analogy he used was walking into a darkened room and turning on the floor lamps located in each corner. Each lamp illuminates a different part of the room. In the same way, different aspects of your main character can be illuminated by what other people say about him or her. This is how we know that Bob Harris, the Bill Murray character in Lost in Translation, is a movie star: He’s sitting at the bar, alone, when two guys start telling him how much they loved his movies, and wonder whether he did all his own stunts. In that one exchange, we learn he is an action star, one whose career seems to be on the decline.
A short time later, I had the opportunity to interview Robert Towne, and during the course of our conversation I asked how he went about creating his characters, especially how he conceived Jake Gittes, the Jack Nicholson character. He replied that the first question he often asks himself when approaching his character is “What is this character afraid of?” In other words, what is his/her deepest fear? Gittes, a private detective who specializes in “discreet investigation,” has a certain reputation to uphold, so he always wants to “look good.” He does everything to make a good impression. He dresses immaculately, has his shoes shined every day, and has his own code of ethics. Gittes’s unspoken, deep-seated fear is not being taken seriously, looking foolish.