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I've been writing a ton lately and I thought I would jot down some of the more useful tools I've been using and if anyone else was so inspired, they too could offer some tools.
No particular order.
→ This isn't a rule, but it is more of a guideline. Ever notice when you are telling someone (or a group of people) a story how you can really feel their adrenaline level? Actors who do theater thrive on that. But I'm constantly thinking about that adrenaline level while I'm writing - if I think I were telling a friend this story and the adrenaline level sinks - I know I've lost the drama. This doesn't mean there have to be explosion and sword fights - not that kind of adrenaline. Maybe call it "interest level" but that's too polite. But even in a "Terms of Endearmnet" movie you are constantly looking for keeping that adrenaline (energy/tension/excitement) up. When it's up, there is drama. And, yes, you can have sword fights and explosions with zero adrenaline - it happens all the time.
→ Related to what I just said - I'm always tring to figure out what the dilemma is right now. If there is no dilemma - it's probably not a movie moment. But there can be dilemma in almost everything, you need to find it. (To say, *I* need to find it.) It's not the only way to boost the adrenaline...
→ After the storygame I talked about the idea of going where you don't want to go. This is a fantastic adernaline kicker because in most situations the resolution is what we're waiting for - we don't like dissonance. Unfortunately we don't like it so much, we often don't want to write it. But the secret it. WE LOVE IT. We love it when it is safe and on the screen. Whenever you realize that your about to make the predictable choice - the comfortable choice - what if you do the exact opposite, or make some other justifiable but unexpected choice? Yes, it might derail your story - but who cares if it is interesting! I've read hundreds of scripts (was a reader many many years ago) and I would so long for someone to please please please shock me. A good surprise and I'm yours for the next 10 pages. You've bought my interest. It's a good thing when you are in need of buying a little time to set somthing up and the dilemma might not have the power just yet.
→ "A bunch of stuff happens." The other day I was asked to write the synopsis for what might be the sequel to a very very big studio movie. It was an odd request because they already knew what they wanted to happen - but they were stuck and on a deadline and one of the team members had worked with me and knew I was a quick writer - so I got the call - they needed it by the next morning. So basically - what I knew was that all these things were going to happen. And they're good storytellers so the things had some relevance, but in some ways they were just things. What was a surprise for me was that once I had all these elements - It was relatively easy to just place them in a logical order and once you had them in order - the necessary links just popped up. And suddenly, there was an entire story. Reminds me of the David Lynch quote (who was quoting his professor who said) "A movie is 70 things that happen." In fact, Raiders of the Lost Ark which I think is a successful pop movie was really created from a variety of ideas that Spielberg and Lucas (and Kasden) thought up and talked about one day - then Kasden went off to write it. Now, Kasden is blazingly talented and thus you have a very strong film where I'm afraid the sequel was not so glorious though came from the same method. So there is definitely a way to make "a bunch of things that happen" more interesting - more meaningful. A strong dilemma, a decent point of view on the material - these help elevate it. But my whole point here is really my personal revelation of what a great tool this is when you are just trying to get that first draft out. You have a passion for some idea - just write down all the things... get enough of them and then start ordering them.
i'm sure I could go on, but I'd like to know... what are some tools the other members here like to use?
No particular order.
→ This isn't a rule, but it is more of a guideline. Ever notice when you are telling someone (or a group of people) a story how you can really feel their adrenaline level? Actors who do theater thrive on that. But I'm constantly thinking about that adrenaline level while I'm writing - if I think I were telling a friend this story and the adrenaline level sinks - I know I've lost the drama. This doesn't mean there have to be explosion and sword fights - not that kind of adrenaline. Maybe call it "interest level" but that's too polite. But even in a "Terms of Endearmnet" movie you are constantly looking for keeping that adrenaline (energy/tension/excitement) up. When it's up, there is drama. And, yes, you can have sword fights and explosions with zero adrenaline - it happens all the time.
→ Related to what I just said - I'm always tring to figure out what the dilemma is right now. If there is no dilemma - it's probably not a movie moment. But there can be dilemma in almost everything, you need to find it. (To say, *I* need to find it.) It's not the only way to boost the adrenaline...
→ After the storygame I talked about the idea of going where you don't want to go. This is a fantastic adernaline kicker because in most situations the resolution is what we're waiting for - we don't like dissonance. Unfortunately we don't like it so much, we often don't want to write it. But the secret it. WE LOVE IT. We love it when it is safe and on the screen. Whenever you realize that your about to make the predictable choice - the comfortable choice - what if you do the exact opposite, or make some other justifiable but unexpected choice? Yes, it might derail your story - but who cares if it is interesting! I've read hundreds of scripts (was a reader many many years ago) and I would so long for someone to please please please shock me. A good surprise and I'm yours for the next 10 pages. You've bought my interest. It's a good thing when you are in need of buying a little time to set somthing up and the dilemma might not have the power just yet.
→ "A bunch of stuff happens." The other day I was asked to write the synopsis for what might be the sequel to a very very big studio movie. It was an odd request because they already knew what they wanted to happen - but they were stuck and on a deadline and one of the team members had worked with me and knew I was a quick writer - so I got the call - they needed it by the next morning. So basically - what I knew was that all these things were going to happen. And they're good storytellers so the things had some relevance, but in some ways they were just things. What was a surprise for me was that once I had all these elements - It was relatively easy to just place them in a logical order and once you had them in order - the necessary links just popped up. And suddenly, there was an entire story. Reminds me of the David Lynch quote (who was quoting his professor who said) "A movie is 70 things that happen." In fact, Raiders of the Lost Ark which I think is a successful pop movie was really created from a variety of ideas that Spielberg and Lucas (and Kasden) thought up and talked about one day - then Kasden went off to write it. Now, Kasden is blazingly talented and thus you have a very strong film where I'm afraid the sequel was not so glorious though came from the same method. So there is definitely a way to make "a bunch of things that happen" more interesting - more meaningful. A strong dilemma, a decent point of view on the material - these help elevate it. But my whole point here is really my personal revelation of what a great tool this is when you are just trying to get that first draft out. You have a passion for some idea - just write down all the things... get enough of them and then start ordering them.
i'm sure I could go on, but I'd like to know... what are some tools the other members here like to use?
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Los Angeles
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Re: tools for writing
Sun, July 24, 2005 - 9:35 AMthanks for opening your toolchest, mark. i need to apply more story/plot tools. most of mine are character-related...
method acting techniques for getting "into character" (or the cookbook versions i know) - exercises using their memories/object, or playing out the defining moment in their life before writing them (in addition to the bio etc)
role-play with someone else. then reverse roles.
on the opposite end of finding realism... write the character as if they were a specific animal/alien. frees me from projecting my idea of human choices -
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Re: tools for writing
Sun, July 24, 2005 - 7:46 PMVery Lejos Egris of you, Q.
Interesting to mention the "method acting" style. Traditionally when people think method acting they are thinking "sense memory" type of exercises where someone gets in touch with their own history and uses that to create emotions. Well, I was theater major in school, so I had a little experience with this. And it never really worked for me. Eventually after college I had an acting coach who saw this right off the bat and basically encouraged me to go totally into imagination - just imagine it was happening. And for me, that worked so much better. But everyone is different.
That said - I've found that in writing, it's not too different for me. When I try to write something that very specifically references my personal life - it doesn't work. When I write about a situation I'm imagining, as long as I've set up the drama right - it works just fine. And, yes, my personality slips into it most definitely. Even personal experiences now and then, but nothing about it is usually "autobiographical."
But that's just some of my personal experience. I think everyone responds to different techniques. Sometimes I mostly respond to a NEW technique just because it's new - different... gets me excited opens an unexpected door for me. Maybe it just works that one time.
I was working with a writer this weekend who writes a great deal and it was quite notable the number of times she'd go to her mental toolkit - and her tools were very different from mine. It was really an exciting process to experience.
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Re: tools for writing
Tue, July 26, 2005 - 8:21 PMI've helped a lot of friends with their writing, particularly their "writer's block" - which I don't really even believe in.
To me there are two main stages to writing, kind of like Inhaling and Exhaling. The Inhaling is research, filling up my mind with images, readings and experiences. If I'm not ready to write, that only means that I haven't done enough research yet. I research the genre, the facts of the story, I pull images together from online and in magazines, and in no time I have more ideas than I know what to do with!
The other thing that I find can keep people, including myself, from actually writing is "over significance". By that I mean that people load up so much pressure on themselves to make the writing good, to make it representative of their dream of how talented they want to be, that they become paralyzed and unable to write a single thing. What I do in this case, and it's also worked wonders for several friends of mine, is a open up a "junk page" in my word processor. Even if I'm in the middle of a script, I open up a new document and just start writing. I give myself permission to write a "bad version" of whatever I'm working on. More often than not, the scene goes well, much better than I thought it would, and I just paste it into the screenplay file. If it doesn't go well, I can toss the junk file away. It wasn't supposed to count anyway. That's what the junk files for. :)
Hope these things are some help.
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Re: tools for writing
Sat, July 30, 2005 - 1:11 AMThe idea of having a lot of individual events woven together into a movie works well, provided they have some common denominator.
Some years ago I got fed up with executing scripted dialog and decided to let the dialog come from real live action.
I filmed and interviewed numerous artists and thus recorded dialog that I could have never written and wisdom I could have never thought of.
This was possible when I became invisible and I stopped directing.
The documentary nature of this type of working had the pleasant side effect that most of the delivery of the dialog was far more real than I would have gotten from actors.
The events and performances were unscripted and all over the place and so my film became unscripted and all over the place.
A year into the project I had lost complete control of what this movie was going to be all about.
It wasn't the story I was going to write and I was not able to will it into my story either.
Then I learned to listen.
Yet, it took me another year before I was able to hear what the dialog was telling me. Finally, it became clear to me that this wasn't going to be my story but the story that was told to me.
So Mark, here then are my tools for writing and directing:
Let others do the talking. Be invisible.
