Screenwriting columnist confirms that screenwriting is nothing but arranging clichés

Whenever I read about the screenwriting game, it always sounds to me like it's nothing more than understanding clichés as fully as possible so that they can be rearranged in such a way that's just barely different from the last time they were successfully rearranged. And nothing in the first paragraph of this fellow's column changes my mind:

Even a hero sometimes needs a push out of the front door and into the arms of adventure. Your detective needs to get himself embroiled in that mystery; your crude-humored man-child needs a reason to get a job so that the "fish out of water" hilarity can ensue; and how about your plucky secretary who is down on her luck but has a heart of gold? Well, she needs that spark to help her decide it's finally time to take her career into her own hands.

Brad Johnson in Script

Ugh. It's worse than boring. It's demeaning.
 

'Readers don't care about the writer and are distracted instead by small things like their own lives'

Loved this.

Personal writing should entertain the reader. (And by this I do not mean the voyeuristic train wreck entertainment that one gets from reading, say, Naomi Wolf's account of losing the Technicolor Wizard of Oz–like effects of her orgasms. It should be deliberately entertaining, not accidentally funny.) Most readers don't care about the writer and are distracted instead by small things like their own lives, and so it is incumbent upon the writer to make them care or draw them in by being fascinating or funny or unusually observant.

-- Katie Roiphe in Slate

Carried to extremes, this attitude might be expressed with a degree of hostility:

It turned out a couple of students had complained to the chair about my comments on their stories. He showed me a page with red slashed across: "Who cares? I don't care! Make me care!"

"What did you mean by this?" he asked.

"Simply that a narrative is worthless unless the reader can be made to care about the characters and what happens to them," I said, as simply as I could.

"You were trying to tell the student that her story is worthless?"

"In its present form, it is worthless."

-- The Secret Diary of a Prisoner in the Creative Writing Gulag

What I'm up to these days - end of summer 2012 version

Pretty much:

1. My job as a technical writer. I have been working at the same place on the same product, more or less, for five and a half years.
2. My current creative writing project, a novel I've been working on since the end of 2008. About my writing, little has changed since I wrote this statement in 2006. The most exciting thing that's happened lately is that I found a stable, productive place to write -- the office where I took this picture.  
3. Reading, most recently Dirty Havana Trilogy, Red April, and By Blood.
4. Exercising, which isn't keeping me from getting fat, but may be keeping me from actually dying quite yet.
5. Church activities.
6. Occasional consumption of literary readings, theater, music and other live art.
7. Even more occasional performance of same.

I observe the weather. I water the garden. I do chores. I mourn our cats who died last year. I correspond with and visit friends, who sometimes visit me. It's a quiet, middle-aged life.

Abandon everything, again. Hit the road.

Very nice essay about/interview with Townes Van Zandt, the songwriter-singer who inspired a generation of Texas songwriters -- including me -- in the LA Review of Books:

On songwriting and inspiration:

Well, sometimes they come from the top — from the roof. Sometimes they come from the floor. Sometimes they come from the window and sometimes the heart. Occasionally from the mind.

On the artist's calling:

But this land is covered with brilliant young and old musicians. What it takes is perseverance, and you have to be lazy. You have to be too lazy to work. When you start, at least, it helps not to have a family, because I started before I had a family. Young men come up to me and say, "I'd really like to do what you do, how shall I go about it?" I say, well you get a guitar or a piano (I prefer a guitar because it's a lot easier to carry than a piano), then you've got to blow off security, money, your family, your loved ones, your home, blow it all off and stay with your guitar somewhere under a bridge and learn how to play it. That's how it goes. That's what I did.

And that discourages a lot of them, 'cause some of them are like, "I have two kids and I work in a gas station. I'm going to save my money and go to Nashville for a week." But that ain't it. And girls, young ladies, occasionally ask me. I say, well first off, you've got to cut all your fingernails on your left hand off. And that stops most of them.

But it ain't easy. I mean, it's not hard; it ain't easy. It's killing me, I know that.

(Yes, I was a guitar player/songwriter when I was a college student in Texas at the same time, the mid 1970s, that TVZ was becoming famous, at least among Texas singer-songwriters. And I did cover some Townes Van Zandt songs -- but everyone did.)

(Post title comes from the English translation of the Visceral Realist manifesto by Roberto Bolaño.)

Good writing advice

Writing should be a process of surprising oneself. If I had a plan, down to the last detail, of what my story will be, what would be the point of writing it? I mean, what is in it for me if I know precisely what is going to happen and what my characters are going to think and say and do? It would simply be a matter of typing.

-- Richard Gwyn, in his "Ricardo Blanco" blog

That's how I know I'm writing well: when something happens in my book that I don't expect, as I'm writing it. As in my first novel Make Nice, in which a major character came busting through a door without warning in the 4th chapter, someone whom I had not planned on or dreamed of, and who insisted on insinuating herself deeply not only in the life of the protagonist but in the themes of the book itself.

Speaking of Make Nice, which is set in 1960 and is about the Rat Pack, the local PBS station showed Ocean's 11 last night. As I was watching it I thought of a series of annotations you could make. Like the conversation between Sinatra, Martin and Davis where they joke about going into politics -- a reflection of Sinatra's strong interest in the candidacy of JFK and his poorly hidden hope that JFK would appoint him to an ambassadorship or government post. Or the running joke about the mother of Peter Lawford's character, which is also an inside joke about Peter Lawford's own domineering mother. And so on -- there is inside joke after inside joke, and probably nobody knows them all anymore.

Apropos, here's a cool page on the interiors seen in the film, including the Vegas casino-resorts which have now all been torn down and replaced by more modern ones, along with an explanation that:

Ocean's 11 preserves some important aspects of the place, like the multiple showrooms in each of the hotels. (Frank) Sinatra, Jr. was most impassioned [on the DVD commentary] when discussing how the casinos used to operate, "when they were owned by individuals, not corporations." He explained that these intimate music lounges existed to "feed live music into the casino," and give gamblers a place to eat and revive themselves for some more gambling. ...

The new corporate owners that took over in the late 1960s figured -- according to Sinatra, Jr. -- "that people should only have to walk as far as the elevator to spend their money," which is when the concept of separate buildings was jettisoned in favor of a a gargantuan hotel that could allow you to never set foot outside of it. ... Sinatra, Jr. was also very detailed about the death of quality entertainment in Vegas, explaining that the number of private lounges were reduced by new corporate owners who felt they were wasting their money with duplications of musicians throughout a casino. The disappearance of the small music lounges that were free-of-charge to gamblers did not seem to affect the flow of people coming through the doors, so the rest of the lounges were torn out, replaced by grand concert halls with high-dollar tickets that could lure in even the non-gamblers.

Yeah no, really

In the first section of The Savage Detectives, García Madero wonders about the Mexican slang term: 'If simón is slang for yes and nel means no, then what does simonel mean?' Four hundred pages later, at the end of the middle section, a former poet named Amadeo Salvatierra ('Like so many hundreds of thousands of Mexicans, I too, when the moment came, stopped writing and reading poetry') recounts the drunken discussion he had one night with Lima and Belano when they had come to seek out any information he might possess about their vanished Cesárea Tinajero:

And I saw two boys, one awake and the other asleep, and the one who was asleep said don't worry, Amadeo, we'll find Cesárea for you even if we have to look under every stone in the north ... And I insisted: don't do it for me. And the one who was asleep ... said: we're not doing it for you, Amadeo, we're doing it for Mexico, for Latin America, for the Third World, for our girlfriends, because we feel like doing it. Were they joking? Weren't they joking?... and then I said: boys, is it worth it? is it worth it? is it really worth it? and the one who was asleep said Simonel.

-- Benjamin Kunkel in The London Review of Books, September 2007.

I was thinking today about the contemporary expression "Yeah no." As far as I can determine, it means "I acknowledge the situation as described as well as the not very helpful suggestion that I take a certain action, but there's no way I am actually going to do that."

Example:

"Look, you could enter this short story contest, you just have to have had some connection to the South, and your story has to be set in the South; you lived in Texas for ten years, why don't you write something funny about it and send it in?"

"Yeah no."

That's just a made-up example. I had reason to use the expression the other day but I can't remember why. Still, it's a useful expression.

The other thought I have about reading and writing is from a Sep. 6, 1959 letter of Flannery O'Connor:

I read about 80 pages of Dr. Pasternak but I am so slow that the book had to go back ere I had fairly begun. There were a lot of wonderful things in those 80 pages but I don't think I could have stood that much formlessness for however many hundred pages there were. A friend of mine reviewed it and said it was like a huge shipwreck with a lot of beautiful things floating in it.

That's already wonderful, but then she immediately follows with these amazing sentences:

You are not supposed to feel at home or at ease in any of the forms you see around you. Create your own form out of what you've got, let it take care of itself.

And then, at the end of the letter:

The thing for you to do is write something with a delayed reaction like those capsules that take an hour to melt in your stomach. In this way, it could be performed on Monday and not make them vomit until Wednesday, by which time they would not be sure who was to blame. This is the principle I operate under and I find it works very well.

-- p. 349, "The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor."

In which I ask myself the same questions they asked Joan Didion

Questions from L.A. Times interview by David Ulin.

Jacket Copy: Throughout [book title] you speak (or write) directly to your readers. How did you develop that device?

Me: Oh, I don't know. Our Town?

JC: Your language is very stripped down in the book: spare, declarative. That makes for a certain tension, given the emotional murkiness of the narrative.

Me: It's because I was in a big hurry. Can't bother with a lot of romantic foofaw.

JC: How much does that have to do with the difficulty of writing about a child? It's harder than writing about a spouse.

Me: You can say that again. Children can't get back at you, at least until they grow up and write novels in which you're the bad guy, but I'll be long gone by then.

JC: What was her reaction to being written about?

Me: Well, she thinks everything's about her anyway, so it was very natural to her.

JC: You write about her presence in your working life -- on assignment, in hotel rooms -- and the effect this may have had on her childhood.

Me: It's true, she had to watch a ton of TV. It's a good thing everything on TV is suitable for children. (Laughs.)

JC: Do you regret it?

Me: Well, there was a period in which she insisted I was Yogi Bear and she was Boo Boo. I had to call her Boo Boo for weeks.

JC: Part of the book deals with parental guilt, or parental failure. You write: "I do not know many people who think they have succeeded as parents."

Me: Yeah, I hate contractions. I had an editor at the student paper who was just nuts about contractions, would not allow a single one. Now when I use them, I feel dirty, but it's a good dirty. As for my failure as a parent, that's well known. I've pretty much failed at every human relationship. But we never expected to be successful as parents.

JC: When you say "successful as parents," what do you mean?

Me: The child goes on to be a very high-earning child star. I know how few of them there are; you have to have the right agent. But we acted as her agent, so we failed at that too.

JC: That's a tendency with all parents, I think. Not quite to see your children, to minimize their concerns ...

Me: Well, they're children, I mean really.

JC: In [book title] you say that writing no longer comes easily to you. But you've never given the impression that writing was the easiest act.

Me: Yes, it is hard to write using no adjectives and contractions. Harder still to talk that way.

JC: What about your novels? Do you find them easier or more difficult to write?

Me: The main problem is maintaining momentum. I go on a tear for a few months, but it takes longer than that to write a novel, for most people. I really admire Georges Simenon, who would write a whole novel in two weeks, though it exhausted him and made him a sex maniac.

JC: With a book like [other book title] it's as if you were building a structure, literally using narrative to stave off chaos and loss.

Me: That's the beauty -- I mean, that is the beauty of being able to talk anyone into anything.

JC: This book, too, attempts to use literature to work through something. You call it "maintaining momentum." But you also note that maintaining momentum ...

Me: Is so difficult when things are happening all around you. You know what Woody Allen said about how a relationship is like a shark: Unless it keeps moving, it dies. But so many things get in the way.

JC: Still, there's a cost, too, when we don't maintain momentum.

Me: It's really true of most things -- damned if you do and damned if you do not.

JC: So for you it's a matter of failing yourself, not other people?

Me: Like I say, what choice do I have?

JC: As if you haven't completed the task?

Me: One is never finished. Why should I finish?

Today's fake: 'Gay Girl in Damascus' actually a straight American man

This won't be news to anybody -- it's been the focus of a fairly intense internet flap for several days -- and I'm just documenting it here in the interest of logging yet another hoax and making a comment or two. Briefly:

1. A blog entitled "Gay Girl in Damascus" attracted attention for some time ("for years," says the Washington Post) [permalink].
2. Several days ago, the pseudononymous author of the blog, one "Amina," was said to have been detained by security forces in Syria, where of course a rebellion is raging.
3. In attempting to verify the alleged arrest and support its victim, some bloggers began to have what Liz Henry* called "painful doubts" about the real existence of "Amina."
4. Investigation by Henry and by Ali Abunimah of the blog "The Electronic Intifada," as well as by mainstream reporters, revealed a number a clues suggesting that "Amina" was actually an American named Tom MacMaster.
5. Today MacMaster has admitted being the author of "Gay Girl in Damascus".

The Washington Post has the whole story [permalink] and a photo of the bearish MacMaster. Meanwhile, Henry has suggested that another blogger, Paula Brooks, who was interviewed by journalists regarding the case may also be a fake persona, perhaps concocted by the same man.

What the hell, everyone says.

First, everyone should read Henry's initial "painful doubts" post, because she raises several interesting issues about online identity and the degree to which what she calls fictional blogging can be a valid form in some cases. And then you should read a 2008 post of hers in which she uncovers an entire blog in which the blogger and most of the commenters are nothing but sockpuppets. That post is especially valuable if: 1) you want insight into how an online citizen journalist goes about investigating online identity, and 2) you want to understand why it matters.

Now that the facts are coming out, it's hard not to see l'affaire Amina as being very much like the J.T. LeRoy hoax, featuring the same attributes of gender crossing, impersonation of a genderqueer person, appropriation of an oppressed minority identity by someone more privileged, and readers' similar emotional feelings of investment and betrayal. (I've blogged several times about the JT LeRoy hoax and about fakes in general -- see below.)

To repeat what I've said before: words matter. Stories matter. I'm sure this MacMaster fellow is going to say he did this to draw attention to the plight of women and homosexuals in the Middle East, or for some other apparently good reason. But when you pretend to be one of an oppressed minority and make people feel sympathy for you, when the truth comes out those people are going to feel you've manipulated them, no matter how noble your motives were. And they're going to be angry.

Update: A comment from a real LGBT blogger in Syria:

To Mr. MacMaster, I say shame on you!!! There are bloggers in Syria who are trying as hard as they can to report news and stories from the country. We have to deal with too many difficulties than you can imagine. What you have done has harmed many, put us all in danger, and made us worry about our LGBT activism. Add to that, that it might have caused doubts about the authenticity of our blogs, stories, and us. Your apology is not accepted, since I have myself started to investigate Amina's arrest. I could have put myself in a grave danger inquiring about a fictitious figure. Really... Shame on you!!!

Previously:

On JT LeRoy:

People Continue To Take 'JT LeRoy' Writer Seriously
The Fake Patrol
Suckers Line Up to claim they were duped by LeRoy hoax
'Other Writers Latched Onto JT as Career Move'

Other hoaxes and fakes:

Is there a 'larger, better truth' than just the facts?
"Really though, at this point, who's to say what's real anymore?"
Author made up quotes, degree, many other false claims
Crazy people make up the best stories
GOP volunteer charged with making false report
Hoaxers as superheroes

* Disclosure: Liz Henry is a friend of mine.

I pity the fool

I was dumbfounded when I saw this subject line in an email today:

Tired of Your Day Job? A Lucrative Writing Career Awaits You!

Oh really! What could it possibly be? Given that it was sent by a vendor of online writing workshops, I had the feeling it wasn't an ad for courses on how to be a technical writer, which is the only lucrative writing career I'm aware of being open to average shmoes.

I was right -- it's not. The opening of the email went like this:

You could be writing for a living!

Writers from around the world have learned how to turn their passion into paying work through Breaking into Copywriting, one of the most popular courses at (their outfit).

If you're not familiar with copywriting, then it's time for you to look into this skyrocketing industry that's the perfect gig for writers just like you. Whether you're an aspiring screenwriter, novelist or playwright, or even just an avid reader, you can turn your love for words into a lucrative career as a freelance copywriter.

Copywriting a "skyrocketing industry"? Really? Somehow I doubt it. There was a short period a few years ago when you could make a little money churning (and I mean churning) out content for SEO websites and things like about.com, but that's a thing of the past, I think.

I'd like to link to a blog post from a few months ago that someone wrote -- someone who really was an aspiring fiction writer -- about attempting to get into this game last year, only to find it frustrating and mind-numbing. I can't find it, but I'll revise this later if I do.

People, if you want to make a lot of money writing, become a tech writer. It's not for everyone, but it's for a heck of a lot more people than screenwriting is. A tech writer with five years experience makes 75-100K a year. An "aspiring screenwriter" who's been trying for five years may still have zero chance to ever make money on it.

On the other hand, if it's your dream to write novels and screenplays, do it. Just don't make it your retirement plan.

This is not a baseball post

"If I don't go out there and perform, those nine years of losing mean absolutely nothing."

#sfgiants OF Aubrey Huff, quoted in a San Jose Mercury News story
about last night's Giants-Dodgers game

Cris uses car trips as an opportunity to ask me things we usually don't have time to talk about. The other day, while we were driving up to our vacation spot in Washington, she asked me if I ever reflected on the fact that my life is half over. I said sure, because the way I look at it, I'm capable of writing a novel every four years or so, and if you take into account the general statistic that few novelists write anything good after age 70 (Philip Roth notwithstanding), that means I have time to write about five more novels at the most, including the one I've been working on for the last year and a half. So counting that way, yes, I see the limits.

This led to me saying how useless it was to reflect on the choices I've made which, in retrospect, represent a deviation from the goal of becoming a published novelist. If I'd moved to New York instead of San Francisco; if I'd gone to the writing program at Naropa when I had the urge in 1978; if I hadn't spent ten solid years devoting my creative energies to performance art, music and dance -- then I might have learned earlier what I now (at age 54) know about writing. It's a waste of time to regret those choices; besides, I had a lot of fun as a performance artist. (I see I've written about this before. At that time I said of my time as a performance artist, "I wouldn't trade it for two novels." Now I'm not so certain. Perhaps if I could still have had all the sex I had then and still made progress on my writing.)

Add to those non-writing years -- actually, I was writing, just not fiction -- the current years of frustration, during which I completed my first novel and got an agent for it (yay!), then had it rejected by a dozen New York publishers (boo!) followed by ... well, let's say I'm farther off today than I was three years ago.

In this context I like the quote by the San Francisco outfielder Huff, who came to the Giants this spring after a decade laboring for non-contending teams. How he must have wondered, during those years, whether it was worth it to play hard. Now he no longer has to wonder. It's a reminder to me that now I have to work as hard as I would if I had a two-book contract with a film option that had been picked up. And to have faith in what I've learned.

Related:
Augusten Burroughs on tenacity

Novelists need large stoves

Things not to be

This literary agency has a helpful list of "Things To Be" and "Not to Be":

Things to Be:
- Confident
- Talented
- Marketable
- Objective
- Scrupulously Self-Critical
- Patient
- A Good Typist

Things Not To Be:

• Insecure - If you lack confidence in yourself, in your writing, or in your ability to become a full-time freelance writer, you'll never be able to stand up to the rigors and the brickbats that lay ahead.


• Marginally Talented - If you haven't yet developed into the kind of writer who works diligently at turning out only the best examples of whatever literary genre you're creating, you're not ready for agency representation.


• Conveniently Self-Forgiving - No one--from Ernest Hemingway to Homer and back again--ever wrote a single draft that "sang." Every writer worth the name knows when and how to rewrite, rewrite, and rewrite some more.

...

More at the link. I guess if you weren't sufficiently "Confident" this would scare you off, but I don't think it's bad advice. But I'm not sure there are that many people who combine the qualities of being confident while at the same time are "Scrupulously Self-Critical."

In this Galleycat interview, the agent goes on to request "fiction that is starkly unique and startlingly appealing," qualifying that requirement with "at least." It's good to set the bar high, but how many people who pass all these criteria would really be good? Can I think my work is "starkly unique" and at the same time be "scrupulously self-critical"? Man.

Georges Perec

Attempting to compensate for my lack of literary education, which has left me with nothing more than uninformed intuitions about literature and how it is shaped, I came across this excellent overview of the career and work of Georges Perec, an Oulipian. And here is a more biographically inclined essay about Perec in the Jewish Daily Forward.

technorati: writing

Read a new story, "Cleaning Up After the Champion"

I posted a short story to a new writers' website, Fictionaut. The story is called "Cleaning Up After the Champion," and is about how normal people react when their loved ones turn into superheroes.

It's either the first in a series of stories about superheroes, or the first chapter in a novel. Works either way. No other stories in the series, if there is one, have been completed, though I have started a couple of them.

Read "Cleaning Up After the Champion."

The Fake Patrol

James Frey's publisher says it don't make no diff'rence whether A Million Little Pieces is "true" or "really happened" or is "full of shit" or "as exaggerated as the CIA's report of WMDs in Iraq."

Know why? Because they have sold over 3.4 million copies of the so-called memoir. Let's do the math. Let's see, 3.4 million copies.... Let's just pretend they sold 3.2 million paperbacks and 200K hardbacks. At $14.95 and $24.95 respectively, times a 25% discount most people probably got on amazon and stuff, that's $4.96  $39.6 million dollars.

So no, they don't give a flying donut hole in hell whether James Frey lived it, made it up, or pulled it out of his ass. They're running with it -- or, as they actually said:

The power of the overall reading experience is such that the book remains a deeply inspiring and redemptive story for millions of readers.

You bet it does -- emphasis on the "millions"!

Does it really matter whether James Frey lived the harrowing life he described in his "non-fiction" book? Does it really matter whether JT Leroy is a 21-year-old diamond in the shit? Isn't the poetry of their work justification enough? Does it really have to be true that that, well, really true way?

Yes -- partly because of those phantom WMDs. The US, the UK, and several other suckers went to war largely over those WMDs, spent billions of dollars, killed tens of thousands of people and injured hundreds of thousands, and left Iraq "mildly radioactive" (as the overly serious Christian Parenti put it at last night's reading at the Make Out Room) -- all because it depends on the definition of what "is" is.

There were WMDs in Iraq... or there were not. James Frey did do time and fall in love with a fellow junkie whom he tragically could not save... or he did not. JT Leroy really exists... or s/he doesn't. Scooter Libby did break the law by leaking Valerie Plame's name... or he didn't say anything.

You know, at some point, words must mean something. Not just sound pretty. Not just paint a realistic picture. Words that are labelled non-fiction must be not fiction, they must be fact.

Or would you rather words mean anything, anything at all?

James Frey, A Million Little Pieces, Doubleday, WMDs