Learning To Write Through Observation And Study

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I’m sitting here at my laptop finishing up a little frugal lifestyle book I’ll be throwing out in the world soon. I took a moment to stare out my window at the trees and looming storm on the horizon. I have some Blues playing and this passionate song came on by Teddy Swims. I just tuned into a line, “skin between my teeth, can’t see the forest for the trees, I’m down on my knees.”

Pretty intense and all of this mans longing in this relationship is summed up in one sentence.

Songs are a great way to learn writing. The song has to convey everything in a few minutes. The whole story, all the emotions are there in a few lines and repetitive chorus. These short musical stories touch us deeply and stay with us for a long time.

Movies are another great way to learn story telling. I watch movies all the time. I have dabbled in screen writing but I’m not there just yet. I have a great book, The Screenwriters Bible by David Trottier. Seven pages in and I felt like I had consumed a semester at a great writing college. I invested in Finale Draft and did start a screenplay. I have the whole outline done except that the ending got complicated and a monkey wrench was thrown in the whole gig. When I figure out that one little part, I will be able to finish.

Until then I pick up my phone repeatedly as if Tom Cruise might text me at any moment and I over snack and talk to Molly, the dog, in that annoying baby voice that gets dogs all wiggly and thinking that there may be a promise of a walk or treat in that high pitched garble.

I have books to study and stories to write, but I find it easier to take up a look out at my desk window. I watch the squirrels navigate the fence, someone ride by on a bike, the birds ride the air above the sugar pines. Or what ever tree because my TreeSnapp app didn’t help me at all. That’s the other thing I do; add apps I never use or order things I later have to take out of the cart because we have a zero budget for extras.

I get caught up in reading books about writing instead of just doing it. Just Do It-Nike. True, true, true.

By the way, the movie about Nike and Michael Jordan is a very inspirational one. Air is the title.

Trumbo is also an inspiring movie and about a writer. Trumbo was a successful screenwriter black listed and jailed in the late 1940’s for being a communist. He was able to overcome and continue writing under pen names and got work for his fellow screenwriters also black listed. He wrote great movies such as Roman Holiday. In later years, he called out all the witch hunters that had denied him and his fellow artist the right to work because of paranoia and political prejudice. As a writer this movie is a hit.

Speaking of ordering things we don’t need, two books arrived; Save The Cat Writes A Novel by Jessica Brody and Shut Up And Write The Book by Jenna Moreci. Both books received rave reviews. But how many books does a person need to learn how to write?

In Writing Down The Bones by Natalie Goldberg, she talks of this very thing, of how we spend so much time reading about writing instead of writing! I have to chuckle on this. I have been guilty of this very thing. I’ve been reading endlessly the writing How To’s. Anne Lamott, Steven King, K.M. Weiland, Jessica Lourey and Viki King. I have a full shelf of writing manuals. I don’t know if they have made my writing better, but they have made me feel scholarly. I can feel smart while I don’t write.

I had a writing slump recently. After years of producing books like a crazy person, some thirty four books in nine years, I didn’t produce for almost two years. I wanted to but when I sat at my writing desk, I would doodle or do a Chakra card spread or make a phone call. For two years. I quit my YouTube channel, thinking that must be the problem. It was taking up a lot of time and thought, but I still didn’t write. I watched movies about writers; Isn’t She Great, Trumbo, Please Stand By. Any movie that had someone writing. I watched them over and over, just playing in the background as I doodled and tried to find answers in a card spread.

I did write during this time but mostly about my feelings about not writing stories.

What broke the spell was finding a story idea and outline in my files that I had done years ago. I wrote up the story and published it recently. It’s short and just a lite little read for someone to pass time on the train, but it got me to write again and it got me back to writing fiction.

The problem is not being able to think up stories. It’s that I get stuck somewhere in the middle or toward the end. How to get to the end and make sense, that’s the mystery. Someone needs to write a book about that. The minute I get stuck in the mud, I walk away. When you get a car stuck in the mud, you put a board under the tire and drive out. Finding the board on an isolated road at night can be a challenge.

I’m going forward to work on a new book but I think I’ll read three more books on writing before that happens. And brew more coffee.

Maybe do an Angel spread.