Living the Romantic Comedy

Shane Black Confronts Your Fears

A Tenth Anniversary Re-Post: November, 2009

I had the great good fortune to have screenwriter/director Shane Black visit my Writing the Character-Driven Screenplay class as guest speaker this past week. Creator of the Lethal Weapon franchise, he  wrote The Last Boy Scout, The Long Kiss Goodnight, and the beloved cult fave Kiss Kiss Bang Bang.

Revered by those of us who know how hard it is to write good, character-driven action fare, he also became infamous, back in the day, for having committed the crime of being one of the most highly paid scribes in Hollywood history. 

Shane turned out to be an uncommonly generous, vulnerable, honest mensch of a guy. I got to play James Lipton and ask the questions, and Shane gave us over an hour and half's worth of enlightening answers re: creating memorable characters and crafting effective big screen stories. A few times in our conversation we talked about digging into one's dark places and dealing with one's fears in the writing process. The last question of the night came from a student who wanted to know how Shane dealt with such fears - where the fear came from and what it was about.

"For most people, fear is daring to wish for something so bad that it matters to you, and then having that taken away. Fear is, I'm not going to get the things I want, and I'm gonna lose the things I have already. That's what fear is, to me. The idea of getting your hopes up? [When I was starting out] I would get my hopes up, and someone would say, What if they just smash you? And then you'll feel worse than ever! And I'd go: Oh, well, I know. I'd rather get my hopes up.

"Here's what the fear does: it's something called 'The Jack Story.' Jack Story's about a guy who's driving and boom, his tire blows out in a rain storm.  By the side of the road, flat. He sees a farmhouse in the distance with a light on, and he thinks, I don't have a jack, I can't change this tire - but maybe the farmer has one.  So he starts walking through the rain and the mud and after a couple of feet he thinks, Well, wait a minute, what if I get to the farmhouse and the guy doesn't have a jack? Then I gotta walk all the way back and I'm getting rained on and it's murder. And he goes, Calm down, it hasn't happened, see what happens, play it by ear, okay?

"So he keeps walking and he thinks, Hmm, what if the farmer has a jack, he does, but I bring it back and it's the wrong kind. And then I've made this whole trip and the expectations, and it gets ruined, and then I have to go back and I can't even drive - Ohmygod, it's even worse. He goes: Relax. It hasn't happened, just relax... Three quarters of the way there, he thinks: What if the farmer has a jack, and it's the right kind, but what if he just doesn't want to give it to me, and he says, I don't know you, fuck you, go out in the rain!

"So the point of the story is, by the time he gets to the farmhouse it's like -- " Shane knocks his fist on the desk. "The farmer goes, Hello? And the guy goes: You know what, take your jack and shove it up your ass!"

"Because you have in your head, already scripted, the conversation based on fear, and you've let fear just run rampant... And I have to remind myself, Stop having conversations that don't exist. I'll feel like I've talked to someone for an hour, but it's the future - the conversation I would be having, and inventing the things I would say, or I'm going to say. And then I never have that conversation. It's just wasted fear time, spent on all the bad things that could happen, instead of the really interesting things that might.

 

"Writing and getting away from your fear, is to me... You know, you might not sell a script. You might not be good. You might not this and you might not that. What's the point in going down that path? There is none. I know it's tough to say, 'Don't be afraid,' or 'Think positive,' but... There really is just no other way to go. You're up against a wall, you've decided you want to do something, you're having some adversity - you can either play out your hand or quit. And I suggest that... My career came down to one moment like that.

"I was working on a script called Shadow Company in 1984, and I was on page one, and I showed it to my brother - he hated it. I sat down and I thought, "I can't do this.  I sat down to write a screenplay - I don't know screenplays, what am I doing, this is so stupid...  And I thought: I don't want to write! I don't want to do this, I can't.

"I'm a one-finger typist. And I said - Just do it." Shane holds his one typing forefinger in the air, and jabs it an invisible keyboard. "I went, 'The... rain... lashes... Ground... Bla-bla-blah. I started typing - I hate this, I hate this, I hate this, I hate this - and all of a sudden, I'm: Huh, okay that's a good line. What would he say there? Okay, he says this... And three pages later, I had a scene, and it became a script - and it sold, optioned - and it got me Lethal Weapon."

"It came down to this. I had a piece of paper in a typewriter and my finger poised to hit one key and I couldn't do it, I didn't want to do it all. All I wanted to do was stop. And I hit the key. And now I have a career. So that's the leap of faith.

"I walked through the fear. You can walk through anything. That's the fabulous truth that I've discovered, is that fear never goes away. But it doesn't stop you from putting one foot in front of the other. And, the most important realization of all, it can't stop you from being creative. It can impede you, but it will not stop you from having great ideas. Fear will do everything except shut you down, mentally. It can't do that."

 

[Classroom photos: Erik Cooper]

The Practice

A Tenth Anniversary Re-Post: May, 2009

 

Stay open for business.
--Gordon Lish

You have never felt more uninspired. You don't have the energy, you don't have the will, you don't have... it. The temptation to avoid the blank page is so powerful that anything -- watching reality TV, scraping poop out of parrot cages, even going to the gym -- seems a vastly more meaningful pursuit. Surely you can skip the hour or two you've set aside to write, just this once. You'll make up for it tomorrow. What could you possibly write, right now, that could be worth the effort? So you close the journal, shut down the laptop, step away from the desk.

You're fucked.

Who is the muse most likely to visit? The writer who's always in her chair at the appointed hour, day after day, or the one who has to be chased down, who shows up when it's most convenient?

How does LeBron James score 44 points in a single game?

An interview with the illustrious producer/songwriter Nick Lowe (you may know him best for his work with Elvis Costello in the late Seventies) can be found in the current issue of The Believer. He had this to say about his process:

Sometimes I find that I have this sort of… this sort of other—I have this person or this thing which I call “the Bloke.” The Bloke is, I suppose, a kind of inspirational thing that—I used to say that when I, you know, was writing songs—I have written a couple of songs, but since I’ve had a little boy, it’s very, very difficult to devote time to it, so I haven’t written much for a while. But I always used to talk about how the best songs that I write are written when the Bloke comes ’round. And it’s this sort of person who I never know when they’re gonna come, or how to get in touch with him, or anything like that, but when they come along, it’s almost like they’re not interested in doing any interviews, they’re not interested in being on the TV or doing any tours; they’re this fantastic songwriter to show me their songs and I write, I do their songs, and claim them for my own. And sometimes the Bloke doesn’t come ’round for months, you know, and I don’t know how to get in touch with him, but I’ve seen him work so many times that I can do a very good impersonation of the Bloke, you know. And I know the difference, I know the difference between my songs, the ones I do and I write, and the ones the Bloke writes. 

I'm going to go out on an extremely short limb and say that Mr. Lowe's Bloke only came round in the first place because Mr. Lowe had his guitar out and his amp on and a pick in his hand.  In the interview, he  marvels at his friend John Hiatt, who really does go to an office every day to write songs, and Nick Lowe professes to be unable to do such a thing.  But given that he also talks about what it takes, in terms of time and energy, to write a single song, I wouldn't exactly call him a slacker:

It takes me months to write one two-and-a-half-minute song. Months! Not always, but—weeks, it can take me weeks to get it, to go over and over it. But I do it when I’m driving my car or I’m doing my shopping or something, and I just think about it and think about it and hit myself with it, you know, “How’s this?” And you jag on a bit, “Woah, hold on, that’s not good,” and then you smooth it out, maybe employ a clever use of a cliché, you know, just to smooth it out, and then you do a clever bit later. So I work on it like mad...

 

For me, writing is like breathing.  I'm always writing something...  Writing is like training for an athlete or practice for a musician.  If you stop entirely, it takes a long time to get your pace back.
--Haruki Murakami

Then there are writers who keep writing, rewriting far beyond the point where some sane people would pronounce a work finished. The method to this madness is actually quite simple:

Writing is like a sculpture where you remove, you eliminate in order to make the work visible. Even those  pages you remove somehow remain. There is a difference between a book of two hundred pages from the very beginning, and a book of two hundred pages which is the result of an original eight hundred pages. The six hundred pages are there. Only you don't see them.
--Elie Wiesel

Until there is a draft, there is nothing. And a draft is written one page, one sentence, one word at a time. The only way out is through.

Sometimes, if things are going badly, I will force myself to write a page in half an hour.  I find that can be done.  I find that what I write when I force myself is generally just as good as what I write when I'm feeling inspired.  It's mainly a matter of forcing yourself to write.  There's a marvelous essay that Sinclair Lewis wrote on how to write.  He said most writers don't understand that the process begins by actually sitting down.
--Tom Wolfe

You're going to die, along with the rest of us. Are you so fundamentally silly in spirit as to pretend that this fact can be ignored? So, then -- you who are blessed and cursed with the belief that you have something worthwhile to say -- what have you said today? What starting point have you given yourself that can be moved on from, tomorrow? 

Fall seven times, stand up eight.

--Japanese proverb

 

(photos: Catherine's Room by Bill Viola) 

Man, Woman, Eat, Drink

"After realizing he knew more about the television on his wall than the food on his plate, award-winning TV producer and amateur chef Jared Stone buys 420 pounds of beef directly from a rancher and embarks on a hilarious and inspiring culinary adventure."

I don't usually read books about food. But Jared Stone, a former student of mine, really got me hooked on this one - because it's also about appreciating your life, questioning your life, and changing your life for the better, achieved through the magic of fine meat and a keenly curious spirit.

Along with culinary tips both mundane and mad (at one point, Stone actually cooks up a batch of bacon chocolate chip cookies) there's all kinds of unexpected adventures in here - and it's also a romantic comedy: the relationship between Stone and his ever-understanding (albeit wryly incredulous) wife Summer features the kind of banter that would make any contemporary screwball proud, and one Valentine's Day episode in particular is ripe for screenplay adaptation...

All this, and recipes, too. So omnivores and life-lovers of all sorts might want to check it out.

British Edition

Four years ago, screenwriter Tess Morris e-mailed me from England to tell me that my rom-com book had helped her write a screenplay, beginning a correspondence that bloomed into a friendship, I'm happy to say. I'm especially happy to have watched her project grow from being "this script I've just finished" to "OMG this movie's getting made!" to this weekend's UK release of Man Up, starring Lake Bell and Simon Pegg, directed by Ben Palmer, which has opened to glowing reviews (check out these tomatoes).

It's great when you can see something that's been created by a friend and you don't have to make up something nice to say about it. In this case I can honestly report that in seeing Man Up I laughed, I cried, and I'm chuffed to see it again when the movie comes out in the USA - should be in the Fall. In the meantime, Living the RomCom readers may be amused to find Writing the Romantic Comedy's praises sung in print: here's Tess's thoughts on rom-com craft, and an interview with Ms. Morris and Mr. Pegg. 

This being an American-born blog, predominately perused by stateside readers, I can't urge you to go see it tonight, but consider this brief post a kind of whet-your-appetite notice: Man Up provides delightful proof that rumors of  the romantic comedy genre's demise have indeed been greatly exaggerated. 

The 10th Annual Asta Awards

The Best in Romantic Comedy 2014

Sad but true: Roughly a year after the rom-com genre was universally declared dead, Hollywood affirmed this trope. Virtually no major romantic comedies were released by the studios in 2014, and those that were released barely made a dent at the box office, and were anything but memorable.

About Last Night, a tepid remake, was a modest success. But does it matter that the instantly forgettable Blended, an Adam Sandler-Drew Barrymore re-pairing so lame it made their Wedding Singer seem positively Shakespearian in retrospect, also made a little money? If you had the misfortune to sit through the chick flick rom-com The Other Woman, you probably regretted it, and you might have stronger negative feelings about the misbegotten raunch rom-com Sex Tape.

Even the usually dependable Woody Allen had an off year with Magic in the Moonlight, despite its beautiful settings and its potentially fun Emma Stone-Colin Firth combo. And then there was That Awkward Moment, when even the most die-hard rom-com genre fans might realize that they couldn't remember if such a negligible movie had been released, let alone whether or not they'd seen it.

It's with mordant amusement that I refer you to 2013's Astas, when LRC was bemoaning the slim-pickings. But that was the year of Her, Don Jon, Before Midnight, and Enough Said, among others - a relative bonanza of genuinely good romantic comedies and dramedies. This year, I offer you a sum total of three Asta Awards. Make of it what you will.

The Bravest Romantic Comedy award goes to writer-director Gillian Robespierre's Obvious Child - a rom-com that was a) essentially about the issue of abortion, and b) floated the (by current political mores) controversial idea that a woman's decision to have one did not signify a necessarily tragic or evil resolution. The movie would've been even more outstandingly courageous if star Jenny Slate didn't get guy in the end, but let's be thankful for what we got: a funny, smart, poignant rom-com that wasn't polemical in its groundbreaking aspects. The film is now Netflix-able and well worth a look if you haven't seen it.

The Best Hybrid Romantic Comedy award - given that it's also a dramedy-social comedy - goes to writer-director-star Chris Rock's Top Five. Despite generally good reviews, this LOL movie is still finding its audience, and it's evidently alienating some (If you're a Rock fan, you know what to expect in terms of raunchiness and subversive provocation, but I totally get why my 89 year-old mom and my teenaged niece, who did not know what they were in for, were bewildered and appalled by it).

In my humble op, Top Five makes a good pairing with Inarritu's Birdman, in that both films deal with the mid-life career crisis of a major celebrity. It plays a bit like an African-American version of Stardust Memories, and not just because Rock has admitted to homaging Woody Allen in interviews. I was thrilled by the good role for Rosario Dawson and the good chemistry between her and her co-star; the movie is about something, and though some of its laughs are misses, the hits are hilarious, and there are some genuinely poignant moments in it, too.

Finally, here's where I'm on a bandwagon with the culture at large, when I present the Best Romantic Comedy of 2014 Asta not to a movie, but to a TV series. As with most adult drama, most of the best comedy writing (and writing, period) is found on the smaller screen these days. And while this turf is genuinely competitive - there was sharp, entertaining romantic comedy to be enjoyed on everything from The Mindy Project to even The Newsroom (well, maybe) - hands down the most awesome rom-com moments of 2014 were to be found in the fourth season of Louis C.K.'s Louie.

I've written extensively about the show here, so I won't go on about it. Suffice to say, these fourteen episodes, half a dozen of which formed a kind of serialized feature, delivered the most moving, funny, and profound romantic comedy material a genre fan could desire. Louie's romance with a woman who couldn't even speak his language (Eszter Balint played the radiant Amia) is one for the ages, and other stand-alone episodes sparkled with rom-com gems. All this and Charles Grodin, too, so really... what does Living the RomCom have to complain about?

Nonetheless, that was the fairly miserable rom-com year that was. But since everything in Hollywood is cyclical, and - despite evidence to the contrary in what was a tough year for humans, overall - love is still the answer, I have hopes for a general romantic comedy comeback in 2015. People are still writing them,  studios are still making them (albeit more cautiously, which to my mind is a very good thing) and now that the worst kind of formulaic cookie-cutter rom-com has been put out to pasture... who knows what new forms, fantasies, and farces lie ahead? Bring it on, 2015! We've got nowhere to go but up.

The Gospel According to Mike

Nichols Quotes for Screenwriters

In the weeks since the demise of American icon Mike Nichols, I’ve been poring over the man’s pronouncements on page and screen, and have come up with some key quotations which – while not originally directed at screenwriters – contain valuable insights for those of us involved in the filmic storytelling game.

“I’ve always been impressed by the fact that upon entering a room full of people, you find them saying one thing, doing another, and wishing they were doing a third. The words are secondary and the secrets are primary. That’s what interests me most.”

- 1965 interview in The National Observer

Succinctly and quickly Nichols directs us to the heart of what makes a story compelling here, suggesting that in any given scene, conflict is immediately inherent if you look to human nature. There’s the voice we use to present ourselves to others, the actions that betray our truer nature, and the hidden desires that motivate us, often unconsciously. Put this tri-level truism to work when you put your characters in a scene, and you’re good to go from the get.

“Improvisation teaches you what a scene is made of — you know, what needs to happen. See, I think the audience asks the question, ‘Why are you telling me this?’ And improvisation teaches you that you MUST answer it. There must be a specific answer. It also teaches you when the beginning is over and it’s time for the middle, and when you’ve had enough middle and it’s time already for the end. And those are all very useful things in directing.”

- 1968 interview by Nora Ephron

Nichols famously came into his own on stage doing routines, often improvised, with Elaine May, and here he reports on an essential truth he learned about scene construction: A scene can’t live, and sustain an audience’s interest, unless the “why,” the real reason for dramatizing a conflict is delivered, clearly and specifically. Consciously driving towards that why, often discovered in a first or second draft, is an imperative I wish more spec screenwriters would respect.

 

Improvisation had given Nichols another invaluable directorial impulse: “To damn well pick something that would happen in the scene—an Event.” As Nichols explains it, the Event in any scene subliminally seeks an agreement with the audience on the human experience. “While you’re expressing what happens, you’re also saying underneath, ‘Do we share this? Are you like me in any way? Oh, look, you are. You laughed!’ ” The building of this agreement through observation and detailed comic business was Nichols’s signature.

-- John Lahr in 2000 New Yorker Profile

In interview after interview, Nichols talked about “the event,” and with good reason. In the thickets of writing a draft, it’s easy to lose sight of a story’s core concern. What is it about? Sydney Pollack spoke of this as the “armature” of a project – the theme that everything else in the story must relate to. “Man defeats monster shark” may be the exterior event, but on a relatable, character-driven level, the core event of Jaws is “how a man finds the courage to face his deepest fear.” To ask of any story or scene, “what’s the real event I’m writing about?” is a worthwhile step for your writing process – a bracing, vital way to maintain your story’s focus.

“The big question, ‘To whom is this moment happening?’ is one of the most crucial questions. My favorite, my biggest question is, ‘What is this really like [when something happens]?’ – never mind the conventions. And I love asking that question of the scene and of the actors and of myself. But my private decision to make is: Whose moment is this? Whose experience is it?”

- Commentary to Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf DVD in conversation with Soderbergh

Deciding whose scene it is and then writing from that character's point of view may be one of the most underdeveloped craft techniques in the spec scripts one reads. Nichols was a master of conveying POV. In The Graduate, the sequence of Benjamin Braddock booking a hotel room for his first assignation with Mrs. Robinson is a textbook on conveying a character’s specific experience, beat by beat; Benjamin’s POV is evident in every moment. When you write a scene that addresses how a specific protagonist experiences the event, you’re forming an empathetic bond with your reader, and the importance of this can’t be underestimated. 

 

“A movie's artistic success, success as an experience, depends on the power of the metaphor that is the central engine of the movie. If you have a powerful metaphor, if the audience knows why they're there, you can soar very high… The engine that is the metaphor is everything. It's in the story—it's as simple as that. The story either contains it or it doesn't.

…We do, as an audience, sense purpose. If there's a purpose inherent in a story, in the metaphor that is a given story, we do sense it and we can be tamed by it. An audience is a ruthless, heartless, and unruly monster, and if it doesn't sense purpose then get out of its way, because it's going to be difficult… What does [the story] mean to you, what does it really mean to you, what does it mean to you that you're not even aware of? How can you communicate on that level, of which you are not necessarily even aware or which you cannot necessarily articulate, to an audience?”

-- interview with Gavin Lambert in Film Comment, 1999

There’s not much I can add to the wisdom of this, and the entire interview it comes from is a fantastic read. Nichols is asking the necessary, most vital questions in storytelling here, and it behooves screenwriters to take the often painful time and effort that's necessary, to dig out the answers for themselves. Nichols spent a career plumbing the depths of the stories he told to bring up this kind of gold. That’s one reason why his best films have withstood the test of time and are likely to remain classics, when more flashy auteurist films have lost their initial allure.

It’s sad to no longer have Mike Nichols with us, but what he had to say can remain a screenwriter’s solace and inspiration.

Kurt Vonnegut's Rules of Writing... for Screenwriters

[Today is Kurt's birthday and Veteran's Day, so this photo of Vonnegut in the Army seems apropos. Also seems a good time to reprint this earlier post.]

Tucked into the grab-bag collection of loose ends that is Bagombo Snuff Box: Uncollected Short Fiction, you will find eight rules for writing a short story. Shortly after Vonnegut's passing, I passed these out to a classroom full of screenwriters, because it seemed to me that the rules applied to the crafting of screenplays as well. Herewith, Mr. V's rules, and a little commentary to make clear their connections to movie work, using quotes from movie folk to show that Great Minds Think Alike (GMTA).

1.  Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.

Oh, but that more writers observed this golden rule! We-the-readers always know when we are bored. Just take note of how the lead sentence of a given screenplay can instantly stop you from reading further, unless it somehow grabs your attention with a "you need to know this!" subtext. What does not waste a stranger's time is something that can take writers years of learning on the job to master, but the point is that simply thinking about this issue -- i.e. will this hold someone else's attention? -- is a worthy pursuit, indeed. GMTA: I'm reminded of screenwriter Callie Khouri's immortal quote, "If you have information on the screen that doesn't move the story forward, you are taking moments away from people's lives."

2.  Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.

Save the cat or pet the dog: screenwriters have a protagonist perform a simple act that embodies a positive value, so that the audience can identify with him or her. They also apply the principle of "unearned suffering": If a little girl loves her dolly, and a bully snatches it, don't you want to see the little girl get her dolly back? This holds especially true for characters who are seemingly unsympathetic. As (GMTA) screenwriter Richard LaGravenese said: "All destructive people have an inner side to them, and the more three-dimentional your characters are on screen the more compassion you can open up in an audience... To me, that involves the audience more, it stimulates them and asks more of them."

3.  Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.

Time and time again, I've addressed the rewrite of a given scene, my own or a client's, with this same simple question: What does each character want? Failing to define this is nine times out of ten what leads to fuzzy and unfocused writing. Put two characters in a scene with unclear actions to achieve and you risk losing your audience. If the characters don't care about getting something while they're in it, why should we? Billy Wilder's maxim (GMTA) "Develop a clean line of action for your leading character" speaks to this; "I want to get a glass of water" suggests one clean and powerful line of action.

4.  Every sentence must do one of two things -- reveal character or advance the action.

Because what else is it doing there, describing scenery? Fine, if the scenery is speaking to character ("His furniture was as cheap as he was") or moving the story along ("The woods are quiet tonight -- too quiet!").  Otherwise? Zzzzzzz... A good story, lyrical though it may be, functions like a shark: it must keep swimming forward to keep breathing. GMTA: Here's producer Lindsay Doran on the subject -- "Scheherezade was a woman who had to make her stories so interesting she didn't get killed that night.  That's exactly how I feel.  We all have to keep our stories so interesting that... if the reel suddenly broke, everybody would rather die than leave that theater and not be able to find out what happened next."

5.  Start as close to the end as possible.

Screenwriter's credo: Come in late and leave early. The awful truth about most screenwriters' exposition is that it's for them -- for them to know. The audience doesn't need all that. In the opening scene of The Godfather, the Godfather is the Godfather. Period. And the movie's story begins when his successor-to-be enters the story: Michael Corleone comes home. Everything we need to know about everyone in the story gets dealt out to us, economically, as events irrevocably move towards the crisis that will cause the passing of the torch from father to son. GMTA: Two rules from Mr. Wilder again -- "Grab 'em by the throat and never let 'em go" and "Know where you're going."

6.  Be a sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them, in order that the reader may see what they are made of.

I love this rule. It's so cruel-but-true. "What's the worst thing that could happen?" is such a time-honored screenwriters' maxim that it even became the title of a bad movie. We don't want to see characters have a sort-of blah day, we want to see the most horrible day of their lives. As Vonnegut shrewdly points out, calamity and crisis is the fastest, most powerful route to revealing character. GMTA: Screenwriter Audrey Wells told my romantic comedy class, "Steep your characters in pain--make them miserable.  Then after they've really suffered, make them happy."

7.  Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.

Re: the movies, this is obvious, yet many a screenplay has fallen on this sword: trying to please "them." There is no Them. Half the time They -- e.g. the studios, who sometimes can't see a hit when it smacks them in the face (see: everyone who turned down Star Wars) -- don't even know what Them (i.e. that ever-elusive fickle "mainstream audience") wants to see. Vonnegut told NPR that he wrote to please his late sister Allie. You may write to please yourself or any other one person, but it's this choice -- your own personal "ideal audience" -- that will focus your work and cohere its voice, not trying to be all things to all people. GMTA: As Paramount's Kathie Fong Yoneda noted in an on-line interview, "Frequently, the writer who tries to add 'something for everyone' ends up pleasing no one."

8.  Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To heck with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.

This last one is tricky to translate, in that often suspense is exactly what a screenwriter is (and should be) after. I think what Mr. Vonnegut is speaking to is the issue of clarity. Many pre-pro screenwriters waste a reader's time by being coy and cagey with the simple and necessary facts of who, where, when, what and why. There's a difference between withholding -- which too often promotes confusion -- and dealing it out slowly. The audience needs to be oriented in time and space, and quickly involved in a character's issues to stay with a story. GMTA: He wasn't a screenwriter, but he was an idol of Kurt's who surely had the definitive take on this. "The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and the lightning bug." -- Mark Twain

(All typewriter photos from Laineys Repertoire)

Nuggets

Let's get the hyperbole out of the way: No one, nowhere - not on TV, in the movies, in theater, in any spoken medium - is writing romantic comedy right now as brilliantly as Louis C.K. 

Much as we (I'm encompassing me, fans, the people who gave Louis two Emmy awards, and perhaps you) may have enjoyed the first three seasons of Louie, what he's been doing in Season 4 is nothing short of mind-blowing. The first two episodes were perfect little stand-alone short features, the second of them like American Fellini, and the third is already culturally historic due to the Fat Girl's monologue. 

Then, in a series of episodes (titled "Elevator"), Louie returned to the ongoing linear story format, the central storyline being: Louie meets and falls in love with Amia (Eszter Balint), a Hungarian woman who doesn't speak English. It's the real thing - a rarity for Louie - blessed and cursed with its finite nature: she has to go back home, where a husband and child await, and there's no negotiating. In last night's episode, as promised, after a mere month of bittersweet joy, Amia left, with Louie bereft.

One of the deep pleasures of this season has been the recurring role Louie has written for Charles Grodin, a world-class curmudgeon and one of the great comedic actors of our age. His character, Dr. Bigelow, grudgingly assisted Louie when he had back trouble early on, and has become an unwilling mentor figure to our hapless hero. In last night's encounter, Louie accosted Grodin as he was walking his three-legged dog, and told the good doctor of his terrible situation:

Louie: Look, I liked the feeling of being in love with her, I liked it. But now she’s gone and I miss her, and it sucks! And I didn’t think it was going to be this bad, and I feel like - Why even be happy, if it’s just gonna lead to this?  It wasn’t worth it. 

Dr. Bigelow: (shakes his head, grimly smiling) Misery… is wasted on the miserable. 

Louie: What?

Dr. Bigelow: Y’know… I’m not entirely sure what your name is, but you are a classic idiot. You think spending time with her, kissing her, having fun with her, you think that’s what it was all about? That was love?

Louie: Yeah!

Dr. Bigelow: This is love. Missing her because she’s gone, wanting to die – You’re so lucky, you’re like a walking poem. Would you rather be some kind of a… a fantasy, some kind of a… a Disney ride? Is that what you want? Don’t you see, this is the good part, this is what you’ve been digging for all this time. Now you finally have it in your hand, this sweet – nugget – of love. Sweet, sad, love, and you want to throw it away. You’ve got it all wrong.

Louie: I thought this was the bad part.

Dr. Bigelow: No! The bad part is when you forget her, when you don’t care about her, when you don’t care about anything. The bad part is coming, so enjoy the heartbreak while you can, for God’s sakes!... Lucky son of a bitch, I haven’t had my heart broken since Marilyn walked out on me, since I was thirty-five years old. What I would give to have that feeling again…! Y’know, I’m not really sure what your name is, but you may be the single most boring person I have ever met. No offense.

Critics throw around the word "Chekhovian" a lot, but in the finale of last night's penultimate episode (Louie's been running them in twos every Monday night on FX, because: he can), a scene in a restaurant where Louie and Amia finally transcended the frustrating wordlessness of their relationship, Louis C.K. went head to head with Anton C., and what he delivered was every bit as funny, sad, and soul-moving as anything Masha, Vanya, Sonya, and the rest ever said or did.

So if you're a fan of romance and comedy and/or a human with a beating heart, and you haven't been on top of this? Go forth and watch Louie, and be sublimely fulfilled. 

Writing When You're Not

Having recently proselytized about my monk-like dedication to The Work, blathering on about the wisdom of diligently writing for twenty minutes a day, I think it's only fair that I own up to my own failure: there were a couple of days this week when that didn't happen.

Do I proclaim myself a hypocrite? The typical "do as I say but not as I do" doodoo-head blowhard? Nope. I'm craftier than that, insidious even - I offer you the ultimate rationalization for such aberrant Lazy Fucking Slacker behavior: I know how to write when I'm not writing.

[Insert maniacal laughter] The premise is obvious: all work and no play makes Jack an internet troll or some other brand of bore. The truth of the writing life is yes, you do have to get out of the house now and then. Suggested exercises include walking, breathing, breaking bread with someone, perhaps even breaking things (Know of a good local Smash Room? Highly recommended).

Sometimes the best counterpoint to the monk-like mind-work that comes with The Writer's Way is do as a zen monk does - that is, empty your mind. To simply sit outside and contemplate a cloud can be a highly productive process. 

That's because one great aspect to writing every day (most days) is that once you've set it in motion, the work doesn't stop when you pull yourself away from your desk. While the left brain's on a break, the right keeps having at it. Which is why many writers I know often have their best lightbulb moments in the middle of majorly not-writing moments. I do great work in the shower, while biking on the beach. And I'm not alone in this. Can I get a witness?

When you're out in the world, you think about other things while your subconscious is working on whatever the problems are in the script.  Once, when I really got stuck on something, I took a weekend off and went to Santa Barbara.  I wasn't thinking about it and woke up in the middle of the night suddenly understanding where I had gone wrong and what I had to change.  Sometimes, your mind has to be released in order to get past things, like a muscle that knots up so tight, there isn't enough blood going through it.  It has to relax in order for the blood to flow again.

-- Amy Holden Jones, in Karl Iglesias's 101 Habits of Highly Successful Screenwriters.

And the social aspect of stepping away is nothing to take for granted. Talking to a real live person in real time (about things besides writing) is a good idea, because living in your head for too long a time can put you on a slippery slope.

The solitude of writing is quite frightening. It's quite close sometimes to madness, one just disappears for a day and loses touch. The ordinary action of taking a dress down to the dry cleaner's or spraying some plants infected with greenfly is a very sane and good thing to do. It brings one back, so to speak.  It also brings the world back.

-- Nadine Gordimer

It also gives you good material:

If a man who writes feels like going to a zoo, he should by all means go to a zoo. He might even be lucky, as I once was when I paid a call at the Bronx Zoo and found myself attending the birth of twin fawns. It was a fine sight, and I lost no time writing a piece about it.

-- E.B. White

No event is wasted on a writer at work, even when there's no tablet at hand. Ultimately, of course, the real trick here is finding that hard-sought, wonderful thing: a sense of balance. Writing when you're not writing only really works when you're doing it in the context of doing your daily work. Otherwise, speaking of slippery slopes...

There was a period last fall when every time I began to write, I went into a perfect blank-minded euphoria, where I stared out the window and felt a love for and oneness with everything. I sat in this state, sometimes for the whole time I had planned to write. I thought to myself, "Lo and behold, I am becoming enlightened!  This is much more important than writing, and besides this is where all writing leads." After this had gone on for quite a while, I asked [Zen teacher] Katagiri Roshi about it. He said,"Oh, it's just laziness. Get to work."

-- Natalie Goldberg

Twenty Minutes

 

There are so many romantic notions about being a writer. Some are perpetuated by writers themselves (it's always advantageous to make your work sound more mysterious than it really is) but the worst, the most pernicious evil of this sort, comes from People Who Could Be Writers, aka LFS (Lazy Fucking Slackers). This is the idea that one needs time to write, i.e. "If I could only find the time to go away and really write, just write, I could get that [screenplay, novel, memoir, essay, perfect tweet] written."

Well, yes: How nice. I wish I had a chunk of time where I had nothing to do but write. I also wish I had a second home in the Bahamas, a private jet, and the answer to world hunger, but none of these are liable to show up this afternoon, and I'd like to finish the novel I'm writing before I'm dead. So in the meantime, all I've got is this little office room in my current apartment (thank goodness for that), a car that really ought to be in the shop, and just enough cash on hand to feed our dogs and cats. But I am writing a novel.

I'm currently holding down three jobs, and I'm a married man. I work full-time at Universal Pictures as a story analyst, I teach at UCLA Extension and at seminars around the world, and I'm a private script consultant who also runs a weekly writing group, while often maintaining my relationship with wife Judith (an empathetic journalist) via watching our favorite TV series together. Nonetheless I do have little dust-grains of that most precious commodity, writer's gold: minutes in the day when I can fit in a little writing.

Minutes?! you say. What am I supposed to do with that?

It can be done this way. I have lived to tell. Some years ago, I wrote the first draft of a first novel in a year by getting up an hour earlier than I had been, six days a week, and said novel was sold to Random House and published some 3-4 years (and some 7 drafts) after that. These days, the commitment is by necessity even shorter: I'm working on my second novel for twenty minutes a day.

Okay, I cheated - it's outlined, and it's based on an old project, so a lot of the grunt work was already done before I embarked on this Writing By Tidbit gambit. Still! At the point where I was complaining about NOT HAVING ENOUGH TIME TO WRITE to my longtime friend and writing soldier-in-arms Mr. Bob, he asked me, What amount of time could I reasonably find in a given day to devote to writing? And thus...

Sometimes I don't get to my 20, first thing. Sometimes it's "Hey, Judith, how much time before that lasagna's out of the oven?" That's when I grab my 20+ (yes, sometimes you get to Plus - I often go past 30). And here's the thing: This first draft will be erratic, all over the place; the quality will be wildly uneven. As with any first draft, it will include blind alleys, tangents, overlooked gold mines... all manner of mistakes will (and have already been) made. But it will exist.

That's the one obvious major accomplishment - creating that all-important something where there formerly was nothing. The other is that by working even 20 minutes a day, you feed the beast. It lives and thrives. The work stays with you. It ferments in your fevered brain. You're "in" the work, even unconsciously, 24/7. And that's immensely valuable, even if the draft itself seriously blows.

First drafts are for learning what your novel or story is about. Revision is working with that knowledge to enlarge and enhance an idea, to re-form it.... The first draft of a book is the most uncertain—where you need guts, the ability to accept the imperfect until it is better. 

--Bernard Malamud

The ability to accept the imperfect until it is better.  Oh great gods in heaven, the wisdom, the zen and the art of creativity inherent in Malamud's phrase.  When you're writing a first draft, perfection is not just the enemy of the good, it's the Death Star.  It will zap you and your big ideas into oblivion before you can get a single passable page out of your printer. 

No, you have to be brave enough to write badly, to write it awful. You need the courage to write a really shitty draft, the sooner, the faster the better. Be wrong fast, as the Pixar guru Andrew Stanton famously put it. After all, a draft is just something to change.

So go for twenty minutes, and go for bad. If you sincerely, consciously embrace the premise that your first draft will suck, you won't compare it to all those paradigms of good writing you've studied, you won't worry about what anyone will think of it, and you won't beat yourself up for any of your multitudinous easily available beat-yourself-up options. Because it sucks! It's supposed to. That's its job.

A lot can happen in twenty minutes. One thing that will happen is: you'll be writing. You'll be a writer, as opposed to a LFS who dreams of that perfect script or book that's always next month, next year, next life. Writing this way may not fit the romantic paradigm, but stick with it, and it will get the damn thing done.

If you bring forth that which is within you, what you bring forth will save you.  If you do not bring forth that which is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you. 

--St. Thomas Aquinas *

Stop thinking about writing as art.  Think of it as work.  If you're an artist, whatever you do is going to be art.  If you're not an artist, at least you can do a good day's work. 

--Paddy Chayefsky

* See the comment by Jeff Takacs re: the proper attribution for this quote