The Art of Strategic Omission

This week I got a few e-mails from aspiring screenwriters who wanted to know if it was okay to keep writing even though the WGA writers are on strike.  Though I understand this impulse to show solidarity with our fellow writers by putting down one's pen (or more likely, closing one's laptop), the answer's self evident: A writer writes.  Regardless.

My favorite definition of a writer has always been Thomas Mann's: A writer is a person for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.  So why should it suddenly be easier?  Dude, who let you off the hook?  You think that just because a bunch of screenwriters are starving more systematically than usual, you get to slack off?!  The nerve.  (Then again, maybe it's evidence that you really are a writer: i.e. a person constantly on the lookout for any excuse to procrastinate.)

I don't believe our current down-time means it's time to merely twiddle our opposables.  Whether you're a writer who hasn't yet made the sale that's got your career into gear, or a formerly working writer who's been abruptly sidelined from the game, now is an excellent moment for woodshedding.

Woodshedding is a musician's term for "going off to practice," and to help those of you with writing time on your hands who might feel like keeping in shape and practicing some scales, I offer a brief exercise in craft.   Call it:

The Art of Strategic Omission

"What's the story?" is one of the most oft-heard questions in our field, yet most screenwriters I know have a hell of a time distilling the essence of their stories down to a simple sentence or two.  It's so easy to get caught up in one's details, and it's so hard to stand back and see the whole of one's own story clearly enough to codify its essentials into bite-sized movie meat.

Fortunately, someone has written a kind of primer on this process, a book that serves up over a thousand demonstrations of how to best get a story summarized.  Felix Feneon wasn't a screenwriter, and his book was written over a hundred years ago, but so what?  It's a work of rarefied genius.

Feneon -- a mysterious critic, Dadaist dandy and possible anarchist, wrote for the French newspaper Le Matin anonymously in 1906, providing the paper with daily news items remarkable in their wit and economy.  They've recently been collected, with an introduction by Luc Sante, in a volume entitled Novels in Three Lines. 

Since his brief reportage appeared as part of the daily news, the events covered by Feneon constitute the usual, its elements as darkly predictable then as they are now: murder, suicide, sexual crimes and general mayhem.   Death is a constant, be it natural or not.  What's most impressive is how the whole of a story is neatly folded into a few declarative statements (here the lines may, due to the vagaries of the blog format, not always come out in three):

M. Colombe, of Rouen, killed himself with a bullet yesterday.  His wife had shot three of them at him in March, and their divorce was imminent.

Feneon applies the same deadpan delivery to the tragi-comedy of an accidental demise:

Catherine Rosello of Toulon, mother of four, got out of the way of a freight train.  She was then run over by a passenger train.

He's a sardonic parodist of romantic comedy:

M.O. Calestroupat met, in Parliament, a lady without airs.  After a passionate night, a sodden awakening: she took him for 11,250 francs.

In Onynnax, Mlle. Cotet, 18, threw acid in the face of M. Besnard, 25.  Love, obviously.

Impressive is his witheringly ironic understatement in the face of what a modern-day tabloid would likely turn into screaming headlines and an outraged full-page spread:

Three is the age of Odette Hautoy, of Roissy.  Nevertheless, L. Marc, who is 30, did not consider her too young.

These "novels" are mordant little beauties of compressed text, reflective of their author's bracingly modern sensibility.  In a NY Times book review, writer Marilyn Johnson (she of an inestimable book on the art of the obituary, The Dead Beat) refers to the three-liners as "Haiku Journalism" and asks:

Who was Fénéon? Part of the first modernist wave and a cultural bricoleur, he worked on the backstage of literature. He translated, published and even discovered many of the enduring names from the late 19th and early 20th centuries — Proust, Apollinaire, Rimbaud, Seurat, Gide, Joyce — but rarely affixed his own to any work. As Sante puts it, “he kept himself to himself.” During an employment lull, Fénéon took a newspaper job for the Paris daily Le Matin. It lasted barely half a year, but proved an absorbing playground for an anarchist who was also a Symbolist with a sense of humor and a very sharp pen. Fortunately, Fénéon’s mistress clipped the anonymously published miniatures and saved them in a scrapbook. Sante tells this story and others in his high-toned introduction (and also makes the case that Fénéon was something of a terrorist when he wasn’t making literary mischief).

Bomb-builder perhaps, he was certainly a unique brand of short story writer.  Witness the neatly telescoped saga, a kind of pre-Raymond Carver minimalism-francaise, contained here:

Eugenie Perichot, of Pailles, neat Saint-Maixent, entertained at his home Mme Lemartrier.  Eugenie Dupuis came to fetch her.  They killed him.  Love.

His social commentary gets slipped in as a low-key gag:

A dishwasher from Nancy, Vital Frerotte, who had just come back from Lourdes cured forever of tuberculosis, died Sunday by mistake.

The cinema of Feneon is character-driven:

Swimming teacher Renard, whose pupils porpoised in the Marne at Charenton, got into the water himself; he drowned.

And the imagery can be positively Hitchcockian:

The schoolchildren of Niort were being crowned.  The chandelier fell, and the laurels of three among them were spotted with a little blood.

On the bowling lawn a stroke leveled M. Andre, 75, of Levallois.  While his ball was still rolling he was no more.

There are enough stories in the universe of Feneon to seed at least a hundred movies, which is one reason I've been poring over these faits divers at leisure.  Their structure rewards study, in that it's most often the elegance of what's been left out that creates the perfect bon mot-ness of his prose.  Identify the crucial essence of a tale and in addressing nothing but that, deftly nail it in your own unique voice -- that's a job writers are often asked to do but rarely pull off.

You might want to try out his techniques in an item of your own.  Determine: What's the compacted lead that will encapsulate the true major event of your story?  There's some woodshedding practice that'll fill up time between stints on the picket line.

Or you could just enjoy Feneon's Novels, period.  That's perhaps the one silver-lining in these dark no-scribing days: if you really can't write, for once you've got plenty of time to read.

Comments

[Christina]

"This week I got a few e-mails from aspiring screenwriters who wanted to know if it was okay to keep writing even though the WGA writers are on strike."

It amuses me that aspiring screenwriters would even ask this question. To me, it feels like a roundabout way of finding an excuse not to write.

I think what might be a problem is for aspiring writers to try to SELL something right now, or take advantage of the strike to get a writing job.

[E.C. Henry]

I'm with Christina (she's so hot -- and she's got a great mind too), I think a lot of so-called "writers" look for reasons not to write, when it's really all about sitting down and working at a CRAFT untill you have made GREAT ART.

The more I write, the more I love the inner process of "woodsheding" on characters in my screenplays. Writers write, BUT they also love peope, it's just in a round-a-bout way. Let's not every stike against discovery and making friends with new people.

- E.C. Henry from Bonney Lake, WA

[Judith Duncan]

So relevant.Having just started a screenwriting course at UCLA,our first assignment was to write the premise of our film in 2 sentences.Oi...it's so hard and here,Feneon makes it so wonderfully simple and powerful.I'll keep reading these and hopefully learn something.

Cheers,
Judith

[Ray-Anne]

'A writer= a person constantly on the lookout for any excuse to procrastinate.'
How I relate to that!
The equivalent to the two line premise as a novelist, must be the art of creating Query Letter to Literary agents.
For example. My blockbuster mystery thriller is 150,000 words set on three continents and opens with a mountaineer with an ice axe climbing a glacier in the High Himalaya. The next scene is a hot dusk in a Napa valley vineyard.
The story is about finding out the truth behind a death.
Now all I have to do is condense the work into five to eight lines. Think Back of book blurb.
Right, Okay.
Sigh.
Best of luck to all of those in the current dispute.

[Al]

http://www.onesentence.org/

This site is more 'opening scene' than narrative arc, and not as masterly, but a good source of inspiration never the less... Cheers, Al.

[Scooter]

I'll have to check the book out, Billy.

Man purchases book at recommendation of witty blogger. Reads book. Finds happiness, peace of mind, writes brilliant screenplay.

[mernitman]

Right, Christina -- What you said.

EC, the back end of your comment reads as if it was translated from the Japanese, but your heart is clearly in the right place.

Judith: "Writing is easy. All you have to do is sit staring at a blank piece of paper until the drops of blood start falling from your forehead."

Ray-Anne. Yikes and good luck. "The search for the truth behind [X]'s death took [Y] from a High Himalayan peak to a Napa Valley vineyard, but..."

Al: Thanks for a look at the fun site.

Man, Scooter, may it only be so easy!

[chris]

Take it to the shed. "Ironically", I am busier with strike than ever before and i'm IN the damn WGA. Throw in 20 hours/week on the picket lines to the average week, well that's more time than I ever spent writing...and I'm doing more writing than ever before. I even found a way to double charge my use of "ironically" with quotation marks! Or does that neutralize it?

Between blog posts and sending email blasts out about where the strike needs help...oy.

Yes, you can keep writing. You should keep writing. You MUST keep writing.

chris

[Moviequill]

That Feneon book would be perfect practice for logline writing

[mernitman]

Chris: Time expands exponentially, don't it (i.e. the more you do, the more time you seem to have to do it)? And I don't mean that "ironically."

Moviequill: Absolutely.

[Joanna Farnsworth]

Thank you, Strikers. For not needing me to stop writing. I don't think I could.

I used to have no trouble NOT writing. I just stopped. But not now. Not since screenwriting. Like those Red Shoes. The brain just won't stop dancing.

A computer breaking a code. JOSHUA playing Global Thermonuclear War. Combinations of story moments roll on and on in search of the elusive progression that makes them a movie.

A monumental organizational task. Tougher than anything I've ever done. The brain fries but won't quit.

I'm glad I don't have to stop writing. I don't think I could.