Creativity is the art of relinquishing control. It is what
happens in the process of cultivating your neuroses.
Understanding drama is understanding yourself.
Characters are aspects of YOU.
Stories worth telling start from your own experiences.
To understand a character’s story, you need to view it from the inside out. Short of an intimate understanding there can be no emotion, only emotional cliché.
Dramatic storytelling involves both creative exposure and creative hiding.
The dramatic storyteller must be aware not only of what he/she is trying to communicate, but also, what he/she is trying to hide.
happens in the process of cultivating your neuroses.
Understanding drama is understanding yourself.
Characters are aspects of YOU.
Stories worth telling start from your own experiences.
To understand a character’s story, you need to view it from the inside out. Short of an intimate understanding there can be no emotion, only emotional cliché.
Dramatic storytelling involves both creative exposure and creative hiding.
The dramatic storyteller must be aware not only of what he/she is trying to communicate, but also, what he/she is trying to hide.
Examine your values - what you believe and disbelieve, what you love and don’t love, what is admirable in human life and what is not so admirable. In short, find and tell those stories that are true to yourself, and tell them completely.
We don’t know the story we are trying to tell. If we did, we wouldn’t need to tell it.
Knowledge is useless. Finding the story requires ridding yourself of everything you know.
What we know stands in the way of what we might discover.
Finding the story is a voyage of discovery – self-discovery.
(2)
“Everyone has talent. What is rare is the courage
to follow the talent to the dark place where it leads."
(Erica Jong)
Fear is elemental to all creative endeavours, i.e.: any endeavour that involves risk. The management of fear is intrinsic to the creation of anything "new" (i.e.: fresh, surprising, original).
To be is to be anxious.
To be creative is to endure the anxiousness – to use it, shape it, transform it, into something that transcends anxiety.
As storytellers we are custodians of a “dreaming” that we are obliged to attend to and work with and birth, in order to share the dream with others in all of its potency.
An appreciation of the inspiration and obsessiveness of storytellers who have gone before can help break down the sense of isolation. Those who have gone before have drawn from the same pool you will draw from, and those who come after will do the same. We are family. We are part of a tradition, whether we know it or not. There is courage to be found in this understanding…
Acquaint yourself with different kinds of storytelling from all sorts of oral and written traditions, including short stories, autobiography, letters, and oral histories (e.g.: Idriess Shah’s
Sufi Tales and Studs Terkel’s Hard Times, Working, etc.).
Know what it is you do not know.
The art of storytelling doesn’t begin and end with a script… it is a way of being in the world; a way of seeing and hearing the world; a way of letting yourself be touched by the world.
(i.e.: by yourself).
Every person, place, memory, image, dream, song, smell, and shadow, is potentially a story, or at least the beginning, middle or end of one.
The expression of “modernism” in poetry is the materialisation of the idea that the power of any poem resides in what is not stated, or shown, but implied. (Pound’s ideogrammatic method, for
example, and Eisenstein’s concept of montage)… the same applies to good dramatic storytelling… it is often what you leave out – what you don’t express (overtly) that has the power
to move an audience and give it the experience of transcendence.
Poets are the most succinct storytellers; their poems, the most succinct form of the story: the brief-but-vivid image, the relationship of one image to another, the implied comparisons,
the particularity of voice, the exactness of phrase, the thumbnails of dramatic structure – it’s no accident the world’s greatest dramatist was a poet.
The inspired writer is alone but seldom lonely. His/her characters have more substance than the strangers posing as cut-outs in the queue at Safeway.
A script is a reply to the unseen, the unheard, that gnaws in the darkness of ignorance. An artist is a person who cannot ignore the gnawing, must address it, deal with it, play it out.
Scripts can and should speak not only for the writer but for those who cannot speak… for those who have no voice. Justice comes into it.
Storytellers must be courageous. Without courage where does one find the strength to confront the unknown - to consider something from a unique or unexpected point of view?
Research, research, research - not for the sake of gathering information but as a way of freeing yourself from it, as a way of building confidence, so necessary in the quest to find the story
that wants to be told.
Learn to convey stories without employing words. Focus on the non-verbal and the imagistic.
A script is not a list of facts… it is an illuminating dance of relationships.
Good writers care about what they are doing, enough to seek out the meaning behind the meaning… the heart behind the intellect…
The world’s greatest storytellers tell the same stories over and over again.
(3)
What is your story? What is your obstacle? What is it you can’t get over?
Effective writing and reading involves more than seeing; it is also about HEARING.
The voice is an essential tool in the writing process.
Become familiar with the nuances of your own voice, and you will begin to discover the other voices that live within you.
Talk about your characters and their stories as if you know them. Gossip, embellish, fabricate. Don’t simply write them down. Live them, breathe them, dream them. Eat them!
A writer makes choices for his/her characters until they are able to choose for themselves; at which point it behoves the writer to let them do as they will and simply manage the time it takes them to do it.
A story progresses according to a character’s needs, fears, plans, and obstacles (i.e.: what stands between the character and his/her goal).
A successful story structure reveals both a character’s strengths and weaknesses.
Leave your ego at the door.
No one has power unless the story itself has power.
Only the story can empower you. You cannot empower yourself. Nor can you humbly or otherwise bestow your power upon the story. You are not a dog; it is not a tree.
The onset of creative thinking/feeling is signalled by the arrival of problems.
Working to solve these problems produces a sense of intimacy with the characters, who also have problems.
The business of telling a story is working through the problems that result from wanting to tell it.
You cannot solve all the problems and then proceed to tell it; the problems are the story you are trying to tell.
The more you seek an intimate relationship with your story and its characters, the more you flee from it and them.
You do not choose your story. It chooses you.
Writing is essentially about catching not pitching. It is about listening, and keeping open.
In the midst of writing to pay the rent, leave time to do the writing you really care about.
As storytellers we are custodians of a “dreaming” that we are obliged to attend to and work with and birth, in order to share the dream with others in all of its potency.
An appreciation of the inspiration and obsessiveness of storytellers who have gone before can help break down the sense of isolation. Those who have gone before have drawn from the same pool you will draw from, and those who come after will do the same. We are family. We are part of a tradition, whether we know it or not. There is courage to be found in this understanding…
Acquaint yourself with different kinds of storytelling from all sorts of oral and written traditions, including short stories, autobiography, letters, and oral histories (e.g.: Idriess Shah’s
Sufi Tales and Studs Terkel’s Hard Times, Working, etc.).
Know what it is you do not know.
The art of storytelling doesn’t begin and end with a script… it is a way of being in the world; a way of seeing and hearing the world; a way of letting yourself be touched by the world.
(i.e.: by yourself).
Every person, place, memory, image, dream, song, smell, and shadow, is potentially a story, or at least the beginning, middle or end of one.
The expression of “modernism” in poetry is the materialisation of the idea that the power of any poem resides in what is not stated, or shown, but implied. (Pound’s ideogrammatic method, for
example, and Eisenstein’s concept of montage)… the same applies to good dramatic storytelling… it is often what you leave out – what you don’t express (overtly) that has the power
to move an audience and give it the experience of transcendence.
Poets are the most succinct storytellers; their poems, the most succinct form of the story: the brief-but-vivid image, the relationship of one image to another, the implied comparisons,
the particularity of voice, the exactness of phrase, the thumbnails of dramatic structure – it’s no accident the world’s greatest dramatist was a poet.
The inspired writer is alone but seldom lonely. His/her characters have more substance than the strangers posing as cut-outs in the queue at Safeway.
A script is a reply to the unseen, the unheard, that gnaws in the darkness of ignorance. An artist is a person who cannot ignore the gnawing, must address it, deal with it, play it out.
Scripts can and should speak not only for the writer but for those who cannot speak… for those who have no voice. Justice comes into it.
Storytellers must be courageous. Without courage where does one find the strength to confront the unknown - to consider something from a unique or unexpected point of view?
Research, research, research - not for the sake of gathering information but as a way of freeing yourself from it, as a way of building confidence, so necessary in the quest to find the story
that wants to be told.
Learn to convey stories without employing words. Focus on the non-verbal and the imagistic.
A script is not a list of facts… it is an illuminating dance of relationships.
Good writers care about what they are doing, enough to seek out the meaning behind the meaning… the heart behind the intellect…
The world’s greatest storytellers tell the same stories over and over again.
(3)
What is your story? What is your obstacle? What is it you can’t get over?
Effective writing and reading involves more than seeing; it is also about HEARING.
The voice is an essential tool in the writing process.
Become familiar with the nuances of your own voice, and you will begin to discover the other voices that live within you.
Talk about your characters and their stories as if you know them. Gossip, embellish, fabricate. Don’t simply write them down. Live them, breathe them, dream them. Eat them!
A writer makes choices for his/her characters until they are able to choose for themselves; at which point it behoves the writer to let them do as they will and simply manage the time it takes them to do it.
A story progresses according to a character’s needs, fears, plans, and obstacles (i.e.: what stands between the character and his/her goal).
A successful story structure reveals both a character’s strengths and weaknesses.
Leave your ego at the door.
No one has power unless the story itself has power.
Only the story can empower you. You cannot empower yourself. Nor can you humbly or otherwise bestow your power upon the story. You are not a dog; it is not a tree.
The onset of creative thinking/feeling is signalled by the arrival of problems.
Working to solve these problems produces a sense of intimacy with the characters, who also have problems.
The business of telling a story is working through the problems that result from wanting to tell it.
You cannot solve all the problems and then proceed to tell it; the problems are the story you are trying to tell.
The more you seek an intimate relationship with your story and its characters, the more you flee from it and them.
You do not choose your story. It chooses you.
Writing is essentially about catching not pitching. It is about listening, and keeping open.
In the midst of writing to pay the rent, leave time to do the writing you really care about.
2 comments:
Hi Billy. Thanks for your insights at the writing seminar. I learned a lot.
I was intrigued by your recognition that the Writer is a character as much as the characters in the script, the Audience and the Tribe. Some writers make this explicit, e.g. Adaptation, which has a multi-layered treatment of the writer-as-character. In fact, there's a whole Tribe of writers!
In Sunset Boulevard, we learn that the writer/narrator anti-hero speaking through the Writer is actually dead, and therefore a Tribal Ancestor. In film noir generally, we often find the protagonist is reluctantly drawn into a situation he believes has nothing to do with him, only to discover that he is intimately connected to the other characters and what happens affects him deeply on a personal level. This mirrors the experience of the Writer. Any thoughts?
Yes, you make some very interesting points, and you are right. Of course, writers are a tribe, so are poets and bakers and candlestick makers. My notion about the writer-as-character demand the appliction of Ockum's Razor, Otherwise we would have endless duplication of who's writing what - as in if the writer is a character then who is writing THAT character, ad naseum. The only real value of this thought/notion for me is that it calls attention to the seamlessness of the story-finding enterprise. There is no actual border line that one can draw that separates the world of the story from the world of the writer, no demarcation line that one might straddle and declare that the story is happening on this side but not that side. It's ALL story - and it's also tortoises all the way down!!
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