Alan Watt's Blog, page 14

Words of Advice for First Time Writers

Words of Advice – For any first-time novelist embarking on their first draft, a few of words of advice:

1) Write quickly. Get it down fast. Your subconscious makes brilliant choices that might not have happened had you spent time reasoning out your characters’ choices. There is nothing logical about human nature.

2) Don’t rewrite as you go. If you do, you may remain a first-time novelist for a long time.

3) Get to the end. You cannot understand the scope and meaning of your story until you reach the ending. It will only become apparent to you in the rewrite. In order to become a published first-time novelist, you must first have a draft to work with.

Please share with me your thoughts on this.


Classes are filling up!
Don’t forget to register for upcoming spring/summer telecourses now.
The 90-Day Novel

The 90-Day Screenplay

Show, Don’t Tell

Show, don’t tell; the mantra of every screenwriting teacher. Film is a visual medium in which character is revealed through behavior. As novelists, we are afforded the luxury of exploring the internal lives of our characters, but this can often be misunderstood by the novice fiction writer as “telling, not showing.” The novice writer can sometimes become so absorbed in the internal lives of his characters that the story collapses into burdensome exposition. The writer doles out more and more backstory in a desperate attempt to get the reader “caught up” so that the actual story can begin. An aspect of the craft lies in disguising or dramatizing exposition to keep the reader turning the page. Showing is not relegated to film writing. Storytelling, regardless of the medium, is dependent upon showing and not telling.

Let’s examine the difference.

Showing is objective. It allows us to draw our own conclusions. Do we trust what we are told in our everyday lives? Hell no! Why should we trust some dude we’ve never met just because he filled a couple hundred pages with words? Telling suggests opinion. Readers are not interested in opinion. Readers are not interested in psychologizing, intellectualizing, philosophizing or conjecture. Readers are only interested in what is happening. Story is the series of beats that leads to our hero’s transformation. This is an infinitely broad canvas on which to paint, but it is a canvas, meaning that it does have borders, that there is a context for the novel. And when that context is broken, it becomes something else; essay, manifesto, diatribe, or worse, therapy.

Showing is visceral, immediate. It pulls us into the experience. Telling is playing God, dictating what one ought to think and feel about a given situation. Telling carries the stink of agenda, of the writer having his thumb on the scale. Telling is boring. It lacks energy and immediacy, and engenders distrust in the reader. As I write this, it occurs to me that I am telling you my opinion. This concerns me. How the hell does this guy know what he’s talking about?

Which bring me to my final point.

There are no rules. It either works or it doesn’t work. You are accountable to no one. You may write a story that is entirely in the mind, a completely non-narrative book that defies all known laws of structure, and nobody will stop you. But after you step back from it a little bit and the dust settles, you may discover that you have shown us something new.

Let me know your thoughts.

Inspiration

First-time novelists seek inspiration.

Here’s where you’ll find inspiration: about a half hour into your writing.

If you’re a first-time novelist, and you’re waiting for the muse . . . stop waiting.

Start writing. You’ll be amazed at what the muse has to tell you.

I always love to hear from writers. Please share with me your thoughts on this.

Classes are filling up!
Don’t forget to register for upcoming spring/summer telecourses now.
The 90-Day Novel

The 90-Day Screenplay

Creativity is our Birthright

Creativity is our birthright. We live in a culture that is invested in our believing otherwise. I frequently hear folks talk of talent as though it were a finite commodity that one either possessed or did not, as opposed to an “inner intelligence” that could be fostered through hard work and persistence.

Writing is not an intellectual exercise, though if you read book reviews, you may be convinced otherwise. I had a “friend” once who read the first draft of my manuscript and told me that it didn’t read like a novel. When I asked this person if I should give it to my agent, I was told, “I’d hold off.” There was no constructive criticism, no concrete or objective ideas on how to improve the work, just a vague, somewhat shaming suggestion that although I had managed to write a 256 page relatively coherent story with a beginning, middle, and end that I had somehow failed to create what was generally considered a book. Imagine my despair! Fortunately I did send the book out into the world, and much to my happy surprise it was well-received. I often think that the writing is the easy part, while being willing to stand our ground and proclaim our truth is what requires bravery.

This is especially true for first-time writers. Who the hell am I to think that I can do this thing? Isn’t it next to impossible to get a book published? Yes and no. I think it helps when one’s focus shifts from “How do I get published?” to “How can I make this story live?” It’s then that we begin to move in the direction of creating stories that are worthy of a reading public.

It is only in retrospect that I realize my friend was the gatekeeper for me. We are going to be tested, and the test, I believe, over and over again, is “How deeply am I willing to trust myself?”

When Oprah asked Cormac McCarthy if he was thrilled at how large his readership had grown, he seemed puzzled. “I write for my friends,” he said. It’s human nature to want accolades, but what if we made our creative curiosity just a little bit more important than our career ambitions? When we do this, we are on our way to writing stories that people will want to read.

How do you make the story more important than the result?

Don’t forget to register for upcoming spring/summer telecourses now!

 

The 90-Day Novel

 

The 90-Day Screenplay

The Shitty First Draft

If you’re a first-time novelist, you may be swinging between thinking your work is the best thing ever, and not worth the paper it’s written on.

The truth is it’s probably both — which is true not just for first-time novelists, but for every writer.

Every writer experiences self-doubt, but self-doubt is just tension. If you don’t make too much meaning out of it, this tension can keep you connected to your work, and alleviate pretension and verbosity.

The biggest fear first-time novelists have is, “Am I doing this right?”

You can’t do it wrong. With every word, you are moving toward the most fully realized version of your story. Everything we write either belongs or is leading us to what ultimately belongs in our story. Even the detours are necessary in order to learn some lesson.

The secret is to give yourself permission to write poorly. Giving yourself permission to write poorly does not lead to poor writing. It opens up the channel and leads to the truth.

My process in writing a first draft involves setting a timer for fifteen minutes. I write longhand, and the goal is to fill the page before the timer goes off. I can usually do it in about twelve minutes, which means I get three minutes to go to the kitchen and enjoy a glass of water. And then, it’s back the timer. It becomes a game. My purpose is to fill the pages. The focus of the first draft is telling the story. I will worry about the quality of the prose in the rewrite.

Question: Do you have any tricks or tools to get the first draft down quickly?

Humor in Writing

There is nothing less funny than writing about humor. I was a standup comic for years, and every once in a while after a show, some dude would come up to me wanting to discuss my act. I’d cringe while listening to the person attempt to intellectualize the mysterious process of getting laughs. And now, here I go.

Humor isn’t about telling a funny story. It’s not relegated to a genre, but is about finding the irony and the contradictions inherent in the human experience.  

It is the sign of a curious and insightful writer. I don’t mean one-liners. I’m talking about having a feeling sense of your story, of appreciating the madness of life and approaching it with a certain detachment. If the story is grim and the voice is entirely grim, playing the same haunting note, we are unlikely to be moved. We need air. Humor connects us and ironically allows us to plunge deeper into the drama. Shakespeare was vitally aware of this. (I’m such a name-dropper!) Humor opens our hearts and draws us in so that we can truly be affected by the story.

 

Question: Is it possible to find humor in any situation?  

 

The Difference Between Journaling and Storytelling

 

Context

The difference between journaling and storytelling is context. Journaling is simply documenting what happened. Storytelling involves illustrating the meaning of what happened. Our goal as storytellers is to tell a story that builds in meaning as it progresses.

Have you ever been to a party and been cornered by someone who tells you some excruciatingly detailed account of their life, but you have no idea why they are telling you. We don’t want to accost our reader. There must be a thematic relevancy to our story.

What is it about? Is it about forgiveness, revenge, freedom, truth, justice, survival, connection, loyalty, voyeurism, control, power, ambition, regret, loss, status, rage, acceptance? Be curious about the nature of that thing you wish to express.

I always love to hear from writers. Please share with me your thoughts on this.

The Courage to be Specific in Writing

We are full of paradoxes. We only love to the extent that we hate. We are constantly changing our minds, constantly renegotiating with ourselves and others. To be specific is to be curious about the truth of the human condition. In Malcolm Galdwell’s The Tipping Point, he talks about how we have a tendency to want to categorize people. Bill is honest. Jack is a liar. This makes us feel secure, as if the world were not more chaotic, ambiguous, and dangerous. This is not the case. Human beings respond based on a multitude of stimuli. Depending on a given situation, we can be honest or dishonest, serious or silly, horny or chaste, stubborn or flexible.

We respond situationally.

When we get specific with our characters our writing comes alive, and we often discover something about our nature that we had been avoiding. Part of the thrill of writing lies in upending long-held beliefs. When an image comes to us, rather than rushing to judgment with “my character would never say or do that,” instead ask yourself, “under what conditions might my character be compelled to behave in such a way?” Every image or idea comes to us for a reason. It is simply our job to be curious. Whatever you believe about a character, be curious about its opposite. Find where that aspect lives in them as well.

You will discover that in every story your hero and antagonist both want the same thing. In the movie SE7EN, Morgan Freeman and Kevin Spacey both want a better world. In One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest, McMurphy and Nurse Ratched both want life to be comfortable and easy. These characters are all seeking to fulfill the same desire, but they approach the world, their perception of the human animal, in distinctly different ways.

The battle is ultimately over an idea. Cuckoo’s Nest questions the idea of conformity, while Se7en questions the idea of humanity’s essential goodness. The writer’s job is to track the beats in a believable way that leads to a transformation. This means being curious and specific about the world of these people. It is within these beats that we can discover electrifying truths. Specificity is the cradle of great writing. When the writer is courageous enough to hold the tension of ambiguity and be curious about the thin line between love and hate, valor and cowardice, humility and pride, he will naturally be led to deeper truths about his characters. It is under the stressful conditions of the story that character is revealed, and it is within those specific moments of decision that the writer has an opportunity to explore his characters, to be willing to ask, “what if?” Just for the hell of it . . . what if my character went this way?

Getting specific is all about rewriting. It means going into the scene and looking for the wrinkles. Once you know the basic arc of the scene, what else can you find when you explore the basic tension? This adds depth and complexity to your story, gives it the stink of realism. We feel like we are there, like we are witnesses. The specific writer is willing to put his curiosity before his fear that the story will fall apart. Let your characters dazzle and surprise you, and then just run behind them with a spyglass and a bucket of words, finding evidence to support their decisions.

 

When you feel like a character isn’t working, do you have any tricks or tools to bring them to life? 

 

Story Structure

Story structure is often taught by story analysts as plot, but it is really the DNA of our protagonist’s internal journey to transformation.

Without a sense of a beginning, middle and ending, you are likely going to get lost, and by having a sense of how to proportion your story you will be more aware of where your story is not working.

I always love to hear from writers. Please share with me your thoughts on this.

Why I Write

When I go to the movies and the lights come down, I am hoping for one thing: that this movie will completely and irrevocably change my life. I want it to alter the way I see the world in the deepest and most surprising way imaginable. I want to laugh and cry until that thing I have lived with all my life, that thing that hampers my ability to see beauty simply and without judgement, becomes dislodged, and I am free in a way that defies description.

That is all I ask.

It is for this reason that I live in a state of near constant disappointment.

But then I see a movie like One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest or Breathless, or The Inlaws (the one with Peter Falk, not the one with Michael Douglas), or I read Jesus’ Son, and I know in my body there is a reason I am alive, that I have a purpose. J.D. Salinger said, “think of the book that you would absolutely love to read, and then write it shamelessly.”

When I was three my mother asked me what I wanted for Christmas. I said I wanted a pencil. Oh God, so badly, I wanted one. I ached for my pencil. I dreamt about my pencil. I had no interest in toys, only pretended to be so you didn’t think I was strange. I would have traded you a stack of comics a mile high and a sea of noisy plastic for my slender shard of graphite. I would close my eyes so that I could see it, so that it was nearer to me. I imagined holding it in my tiny hand. And I didn’t want just any pencil. I wanted my pencil, a pencil of my own, one that belonged to me. It would be a pencil that I would choose.

Because, you see, I had a plan.

My pencil was going to be a magic pencil. It was going to take me everywhere. And it had to be a pencil, because you can’t fix mistakes with a pen. I remember thinking the eraser was the most brilliant invention. Incredible. You can write with one end, and edit with the other.

I still remember running through the store with my brothers and my sister, past all of the toys, my little forehead hot with anticipation at the prospect of having my first, my very own pencil. My precious mother understood. This was serious business, and she did not hold back with the pomp and the circumstance. She understood that nothing short of a parade was necessary to usher in the singularly most important moment of my life.

It was orange, with a green stripe around the metal top, and a fresh pink eraser on the end.

Of course, at three years of age I didn’t know how to spell, but my brother taught me how to write numbers up to one hundred. I went through a thousand sheets of paper, moving my hand across the page, writing from one to ten, ten to twenty, and so on across and down the page. My heart rested when I was writing. As my hand moved smoothly across the page, I knew I had found what I would do for the rest of my life. (Thirty years later this image of writing became the final image in my first novel).

So many of my students and potential students come to me wanting to know how to get published and produced. They want their work to be read, to be seen. But what they really want is for themselves to be seen.

Here’s the thing. We do not need to be seen!

We are adults now. That time is past. We need to see ourselves.

We need to be more curious about the world of our story than about any goddamn idea of security, of fame, any idea that some kind of validation from outside of ourselves is going to make one bit difference. Fame does not make you a better writer, so what good is it? Of course, I’m the first to admit that when the writing ain’t working, I would love a little bit more of it, something to soothe the bruised ego, to temper the doubt and silence the critic. I have had my small acre of fame, and it nearly destroyed me. It killed my writer for more than a couple of years. Doesn’t mean I won’t welcome it again, but next time I’ll pay it the respect it deserves.

There is nothing logical about wanting to be a writer. The lives of artists can be awful, despairing, regret-filled exercises in futility. Writers and artists are some of the most wretched people you can ever imagine. They suffer, often needlessly, and are no more noble or wise than anyone else. These are desperate people, junkies really, jonesing for a hit of truth.

Writing is not for everyone. Maybe not even for anyone. Years ago, I taught a class at UCLA, a summer class, to a roomful of kids who were heading into their first year of college, and it turned out I was teaching their bullshit elective. I came in with guns blazing and was devastated to learn that they didn’t love writing as much as I did. Hell, they couldn’t have cared less. I wanted to hate them, these beautiful children, but they were smarter than me. They taught me how dangerous it is to care.

They seemed so apathetic, like they had spent the past eighteen years staring at a glass-boxed babysitter that taught them how to murder. Except one kid. His name was Mike. Mike was from Jersey. He was a trouble-maker, and doubtless came from trouble. The second day, he showed me his citation for urinating in public. (This, in and of itself is not necessarily the sign of an artist, but it got my attention). The fact that he showed it to me . . . damn, he was telling me something. He was pissed off (no pun intended), and when he wrote, he wrote with madness and joy. The world came alive to him when he wrote. It was palpable. He cared about the words. He valued them. He wanted to smash down walls, and break through to something that felt real. His writing was dangerous. It’s dangerous to care.

You never know who the writers are. Some writers are dogged, and become writers by sheer will, and some of us got roped into it at three without having any say in the matter. I’m a lifer. My failures exceed my successes, if I can call anything I’ve done a success. Perhaps that’s up to someone else. Or maybe there’s no such thing. I tend to believe there’s no such thing. In my heart of hearts, we’re all already free and there’s nothing to prove. Vonnegut said, “We’re just here to fart around, and don’t let anyone tell you different.”

I became a writer because I wanted to change the world, and yet I know, so deep down in my heart that it is impossible. It can never be done. And that is why I write.

I am rebelling against entropy.

I think about that kid sometimes. Mike. He asked for my email, but I never heard from him. I wonder if he’s a writer. I wonder if he got scared or sidetracked, or got into trouble that he couldn’t get out of. I wonder if he found a real job and rationalized why this writing racket was just another one of his bad ideas. I wonder if someone hurt him, told him that his writing was wrong. I wonder if he got some teacher who tried to tame him and drove him sane. I think about Mike, and all the Mikes out there who have something to give and have been silenced, or have become silent. It embarrasses me sometimes how much I care about writers, how it is sometimes the only thing that I care about. My heart aches for the Mikes, because I know that when I write, it is because I want to belong somewhere, because when I go to parties and people talk about bullshit, I want to scream. I write because it is my job to hold up my end of the bargain, so that when I meet another writer, I don’t have to feel like I’m cheating on them, because that’s how I feel when I don’t write. Like a man who is cheating on his wife. Writing has given me a life beyond my wildest dreams. And tomorrow I get to do it again.

WHY DO YOU WRITE?