Going the Distance

Are you in it for the long haul?  Are you a better sprinter?

Short stories and poems can sometimes come in flashes of inspiration.  When they do you write them down furiously with the force of an explosive sprinter.

Conversely, novels and screenplays are long term projects.  No one writes a novel or screenplay in one sitting.  To successfully accomplish your writing goals you'll need to treat your project like a sustained marathon effort not a dynamic sprint.

Interestingly, I've also found that a screenplay or other long work is more like a marathon of hurdles.  You will encounter one bump in the road after the other.  Scenes you thought were brilliant one day won't work when you reread them a week later.  Some days you'll feel like you're running in place, not making any progress a all, your destination no closer as a result of your efforts.  It's especially on these days that you've got to make sure you carve out your writing time and just get through it.

One way I managed to get through my first script was to set mini-goals for myself that I could reach within a day or two at most.  Hitting these goals day after day helped to build my confidence which in turn kept me motivated.

Naturally, this approach isn't meant for all writers.  So, in the spirit of fun, here's a completely different  philosophy and approach.  Viki King's How To Write A Movie in 21 Days, baffles and excites me.   Ms. King offers some great insights and exercises regardless of how fast you ultimately write your screenplay.  A really fun and informative read.  I highly recommend it.

This week's suggested website: Book-in-a-Week - (www.book-in-a-week.com) This site is for ambitious people only. Book-in-a-Week encourages writers to write as much as possible during the first week of every month.


This week's writing prompt: Give yourself five uninterrupted minutes of quiet time. Consider the project you're currently working on.  Give yourself realistic daily mini-goals for the coming week, e.g., Monday - 1,000 words in the novel, Tuesday - research my main character's favorite hobby, Wednesday - re-read and clean up scene #3, etc.  The idea here is to build your masterpiece slowly and methodically.  Be sure to set a goal that matches your current skill level and comfortability.  This will reinforce your writing practice.  Have a great writing week.

Can Artists Be Organized?

Like many people, I struggle with being organized, both in my personal life and in my writing.  But, every now and then something lights a fire under my butt and I go into "ACTION" mode.  A day of intense house cleaning does wonders for moving your life and creativity forward.  Clearing out the cobwebs of doubt, fear, indecision, etc.  is a necessary process to ensure a healthy artistic life and push through to clarity.

Frustrated that I haven't finished a significant piece of work in a while (it happens to every writer), I called a friend of mine who's a producer in New York and someone who's opinion I trust to have a bitch and moan session.  Afterward, I decided to take  stock of where I was with my various projects.  I had a vague idea that I was juggling multiple story lines, characters, etc. in my head for some time but didn't have a clue to what extent.

After spending some time digging through piles of old notes, scanning my hard drive for computer files of character breakdowns, treatments, etc.  I realized that I had no less than seven feature films, five television shows and two novels swirling around in my head and in various stages on paper.  I was even seventy pages deep into one script idea.  I never realized I had so much material.  I actually had been very busy all along.   I hadn't seen any "real" progress because my efforts were spread thin to say the least.

Now, I found the fortitude to hunker down, focus and finish something.  I have tons to work with.  And I'm relieved to find out I haven't been meandering, wasting time getting nowhere.  I was just momentarily scattered and maybe a little dejected -- common states of emotion that all writers need to get used to.  Does any of this sound familiar?  Do you go through a similar process of creative monsoons followed by what seem like creative droughts?

Perhaps the most influential book on creativity and more importantly the psychosis of a creative person I've ever read is Julia Cameron's "The Artist's Way."  In more ways than I could ever express here, she has kept me sane.  She really covers it all, rejection, self-doubt, writer's block, commitment, etc.  Her exercises are fun and effective.  She's a true lover of the creative process and understands it from the inside.  I truly urge you to take a look at her work - it will influence your own for certain.

Maybe being organized doesn't come naturally for you either but cultivating the habit of being organized can help when the ideas are pouring in on top of each other.  Organization helps us affirm that our work is valuable and has a place in the world, namely, prominently displayed!

This week's suggested website: The Poetry Foundation. Publishers of Poetry Magazine.  These guys have been around for over 90 years, well worth checking out.  (www.poetrymagazine.org) Nothing informs your imagination and feeds your creativity like poetry.  


This week's writing prompt:  Give yourself five uninterrupted minutes of quiet time. I call this exercise adding to The Golden Notebook.   I hope you'll use it for years to come.  It's a simple yet powerful tool for affirmation, a yardstick to measure your writing progress over the years, and a deep well of inspiration when you feel you may have writer's block.  Here's how I found it works best for me:  Take your favorite notebook and create a master list of the titles of all the projects you've ever contemplated undertaking.  Imagine that you've already written them all.  Then list next to each title a small logline or 3 line synopsis of that work.  Treat it as if you were asked to catalog the works of a great master.


Here's an example from my own Golden notebook.


Title: Blood and Grace
An up and coming Spanish matador develops a growing obsession with a touring Russian ballerina.




Title: Jasmine Hill
A frustrated novelist and professor of English at a prestigious New England university goes on sabbatical when she can't get a publisher interested in her latest novel.


Keep your Golden Notebook filled with the seeds of your future masterpieces.  This is where you'll come to when you're ready to plant something in the fertile ground of your writing.  The best ideas will always find a way to capture your attention and force you to plant them, fertilize them, harvest them and share the bounty.

The Art of Perfect Timing

Have you ever been told you had perfect timing?  Remember how glorious that brief moment felt when everything fell into place harmoniously, effortlessly?

How do you keep your story riveting from beginning to end? Like a good driver who knows when to put the pedal to the metal and when to slow down around the curves, a good writer is aware of a story's pace.  Every page of your script better be moving the story forward or it'll translate into one big yawn by the time it gets to the big screen.

One of the biggest surprises I experienced while working on the initial rough cut of my film, WATERCOLORS was how slowly the pace was moving.  I had two actors in a bedroom just talking for a large chunk of the first act.  I was fortunate enough to have worked with a great editor, who chopped off large chunks of dialog while still managing to keep the mood of the scene in tact.  An extra two or three weeks working on the script with particular attention to pacing may have eliminated costly days of shooting.

Of course, hindsight is 20/20.  But, I learned a valuable lesson about editing.  It's easier to do it on the page than in front of an expensive editing bay running the latest software, at a hefty hourly rate.  It's easier to crumble up a page and throw it in the garbage and start over than to rehearse a scene with actors, spend hours shooting it and start putting it together in the editing suite only to realize it's over written, slow and boring.

A screenplay is not prose fiction.  You can't delve into a character's inner thoughts.  That's the realm of the novel.  A screenplay is not an endless string of monologues.  Words thrive in the realm of the play.

There's a limited amount of time in a screenplay to get across a lot of information.  Keep in mind that a screenplay is merely a blueprint for actors and a production team to turn into a film.  Every word has to belong there.  Anything that can be cut will and should be cut during the process of making the film.  Start by being ruthless during the writing process.  Its an exercise in extreme minimalism.

One thing I advise writers to do is to start as late in the scene as possible.  If the murderer is about to kill his next victim, let's start with the action, the killer closing in with a machete!  Let's not start with what the victim had for breakfast or how motivated a saleswoman she was, or what a great single mother she was.  If those qualities are pertinent to the story, they'll emerge.   Start with a bang.  Perhaps not a huge bang as your opening sequence but in a sense each scene in your screenplay has its own beginning, middle and end.  Start every scene with an intriguing, rich opening of its own. Weave events together so you have a tapestry of rising action, rising stakes, rising tension.

It's said that each page is approximately one minute of screen time.  Make every moment in your script count.  Make sure if it's in there, it helps push your story forward.


This week's suggested website: The New Yorker Magazine (www.newyorker.com) has been in print since 1925.  It's my personal favorite.  Some of the best writers of the today publish fiction and essays here.  Well worth the price of a subscription.


This week's writing prompt: Give yourself five uninterrupted minutes of quiet time.  Take a story you're currently working on and examine the opening scene.  Can you think of anything in your existing sequence that can be cut?  Is there anything slowing down your opening?  Spend five minutes reviewing your work for pacing.

Writing as Healing

Among other things, writing is a miraculous healing tool.  Whether we're on the receiving end of an eloquently delivered, thoughtfully prepared speech, or pouring our hearts out on the pages of a journal, writing is a powerful emotional tonic.  Writing offers us the opportunity to reinvent ourselves, to rewrite our personal histories.  Writing offers us catharsis.  And, the need for a cathartic experience is the reason an audience pays the price of admission in the first place.


Indeed, the very purpose of a story, whether it's on the page or on the screen, is to provoke an emotional response in the viewer/reader.  Oddly enough, all six and a half billion of us human beings seem to respond in predictable ways to the same things.  We all have hopes, dreams, fears, superstitions, etc.  In the end, the only thing frightening thing is how similar they all are.  No other work better explains the need of story telling and the importance of symbols and rituals throughout human evolution than Joseph Campbell's and Bill Moyer's conversation, "The Power of Myth."  I come back to this work again and again and always get a little something more from it with each reading.  I highly recommend you add it to your writer's bookshelf.



By all means it's great to exercise one's own demons, but to write for the entertainment industry requires more than bearing one's soul, however brave, honest and gut-wrenching that may be.  Industry professionals expect more from a writer than the shock value of exposing the dark side of human nature for the sake of grabbing the attention of a few readers or viewers.

A screenplay, first of all, has to be produceable.  It needs to stay within certain parameters (some creative, some financial, some just insane) that work to the advantage of many parties with different agendas and priorities (producers, agents, talent, backers, distributors, etc.)  Ultimately, a well written, engaging story that touches on universal themes and has something intelligent to say about the human condition will have a better chance of getting produced and distributed.

Hollywood loves an uplifting, inspirational story with a happy ending.  We love to watch the underdog win in the end.  Watching our heroes and heroines overcome immense adversity is an essential part of our own growth.  Vicariously, we get to catch the bad guy, win the race, save the planet and gain a little personal glory.

This week's suggested website: Kickstarter.com (www.kickstarter.com).  A great concept that's actually working to get some artists some very valuable attention.  This site is designed to get creative projects of all types funded.


This week's writing prompt: Give yourself five uninterrupted minutes of quiet time.  Let's focus on dialogue.  One way to look at dialog is to include what people say as well as what they hide. Write a one page confrontational scene between two characters using only dialog.  Drop some hints of what's to come in the story or what has already transpired with these two using only dialog.  Write for five minutes.  

Heroes and Masterpieces

It's an extraordinary feeling to be around great art.  It's transformative.  In a way, I was spoiled growing up in New York City with all it had to offer on a constant basis.  This week I visited The Houston Museum of Fine Arts to see an impressionist and post-impressionist exhibit.  Van Gogh, Renoir, Monet, Cezanne, Seurat, etc.  were all there in full force.  These were the masters, I thought.   Innovators that we can still marvel over.  I was struck by how bold they all were.  How outrageous the chances they took were.  The art world had never seen anything like it before.  They were treading new ground.  Over 150 years later, I'm feeling the same excitement as I looked at Van Gogh's bold lines and even bolder choice of colors.  I'm mesmerized by Seurat's ability to patiently paint one dot of color at a time until he vision was realized.  This need for boldness also exists in writing.

Also this week, I finished reading my first novel of the year.  I figured I would read this book since 2011 is the Year of the Rabbit on the Chinese calendar.   The Year of the Hare, by Arto Paasilinna is witty, inventive and full of unexpected turns.  It's a quick read about a man and a wild hare who travel all over Finland on some crazy adventures.  Again, another creative expression of boldness!  I truly liked it.


I've always been attracted to the adventure story.  I get swept away in the plot driven antics of a Pippi Longstockings or Sinbad the Sailor.  The pattern is quite well worn.  It's the classic hero's journey.  The hero enters an unkown world, makes valuable realizations about himself and the world then returns to share the wisdom he's gained on his travels.  How much bolder does it get?

A writer also needs to be bold.  A writer must take daring chances to express something that may not translate to others.  In the end, what you write may not be commercially successful, it may not be widely read, it may not be reviewed well, it may lie unpublished.  That's what makes the act of writing all that much more courageous.  Writing is having the courage to open up a topic that may be painful and others would prefer never to discuss.  Writing is daring to make a fool of yourself and revealing your childhood playfulness.  Ultimately, you have to want to express something, you have to want to touch an audience.  The same freshness that the impressionists offered is what audiences are craving for today.  They want the unique, fresh YOU.  Bold, uninhibited and honest.

A great book on this topic is Eric Maisel's, "Coaching the Artist Within."  Dr. Maisel is an author of multiple books on the creative life.  But this one is like having someone who understands what you're going through in your corner when you need it most.    Be sure to add it to your writer's bookshelf.

 This week's suggested website: Writer's Digest.  (www.writersdigest.com) is a warehouse of great  material.  They publish books and articles on all aspects of writing.  They also offer online courses, moderate discussion forums, etc.  Their tips on getting published are probably the best out there.


This week's writing prompt: Give yourself five uninterrupted minutes of quiet time.  Let's hone in on your interviewing skills.  This exercise is designed to help you get in the habit of asking penetrating questions.  Imagine that you have the opportunity to sit down with any figure in history, in any area of expertise for a private interview.  Go beyond what we already know about the person and find something that reveals character.  Did Teddy Roosevelt love the saxophone?  Did Shakespeare have a fear of mice?  Find that odd, unique or interesting detail about your historic figure that tells us, or better, shows us what kind of person he/she was.  Write for five minutes.  

Great Characters - Great Impact

We know that great writing provokes our thinking, widens our scope of the world. Some of us have even experienced great writing that motivates our actions. Years ago, I saw a play called "Jeffrey" in New York. In the play, one of the characters volunteers at an AIDS maternity ward feeding newborn babies. I was touched by the gesture and decided to look into it as something I would do myself. As it turned out the babies weren't separated in New York city maternity wards because their was little chance of spreading the HIV virus among newborns. Nice to know.

I spent the next few months feeding and changing babies. That experience taught me that if I wanted to adopt a child, I could handle it. A few years after that, I did adopt. Am I suggesting it was because of the character in Jeffrey? Probably not, but it sparked a flame that was already burning within me. And, I believe great writing can do that. A great character challenges us to behave in different ways than we ordinarily would, approach a situation differently or take action where we would never have thought to.

I stop now to think about all the characters that come to mind. Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn, Jay Gatsby, Scarlett O'Hara each left a mark in me, each planted a seed of "emotional DNA" in my being. We each have a list of our own literary heroes. Now, stop for a moment and think about all the young writers your work can help illuminate in the future. The stories boiling up inside of you may very well mean the world to someone looking for their own voice in writing in the future. By devoting yourself to your craft now, you're helping to strengthen the writers of tomorrow. You may be the writer than someone looks up to and wants to emulate. Your words can potentially change the course of someone's life. Your characters can leave a mark on generations to come. Don't think for a moment that your creativity is not that important. It is, in fact it's critical!

But who'll write your stories if you don't?  No one has your particular view point of the world.  No one has your unique way of expressing things.  No one shares your exact powers of observation.  I've always said that five stolen moments during the day is better than nothing.  But the truth is writing anything requires getting through that first horrible draft.  Then it requires many rewrites.  When the time is right it will require feedback from people you trust.  But, writing like the greatest architecture, stands the test of time.  It lives on.  It breathes a life of its own and extends beyond you in ways you can never imagine.  Sometimes the most important thing to remember is just keep the pen moving across the page - keep the fingers dancing on the keyboard.  Like a muscle, writing gets easier the more you do it.

In general what we tend to remember most about great movies or novels is their characters.  A well written, three dimensional character is at the heart of every great story.  The audience needs to identify with your protagonist.  We need to know who we're rooting for.  Rich, unusual characters will lead you to the new comedic and dramatic territory.  Think for a moment of the people you remember most from your own life?  What was it about them that captured your attention?  Can you incorporate these traits into one of your own characters?  Can you take a foible or quirk from someone in real life and exaggerate it to good use in your own fiction?

I was recently working on a character who lives a life of seclusion in the Brazilian rainforest.  I liked what I had so far but when I added a surprise element the character took on a new life.  I think he's much more interesting and well-rounded now.  What I gave him was a great love of jazz.  Then to make that visual, I gave him a trumpet.  Now I have him bringing his trumpet to the jungle and taking it out to play at night.  Now the character has a "hook" that engages our interest.

Linda Seger, a sought after teacher and script consultant in Hollywood has written a great book on the subject, "Creating Unforgettable Characters."  I highly recommend putting it on your writer's shelf.


This week's suggested website: The Gotham Writer's Workshop  (www.writingclasses.com) is located in New York City (hence the name).  This group publishes some great books on fiction and screenwriting.  It also offers courses in-person and online in poetry writing, play writing and even memoir.




This week's writing prompt:  Give yourself five uninterrupted minutes of quiet time.  Using the first person point of view, have your main character tell us (the reader) an episode from his or her life.  Let your character describe a defining moment, an accomplishment, an epiphany or an embarrassment.  Be sure to let your character use his or her own vocabulary.  Let it be conversational, in his or her own voice.  Limit this exercise to one page.

Friends, Fragments and First Drafts

When it comes to writing, I never throw anything away.  Like mining for gold, writing is a process of excavation and sifting through sediment to get to "the good stuff."  You dig deep for the truth your characters want to embody.  You dig deep for themes that reveal something about the human condition.  The sediment that is disturbed comes in the form of many drafts.  Awful, incoherent, sometimes nonsensical drafts.  It's essential that you learn to keep these drafts so you can sift through them later and ascertain their true value at a time when you're not so emotionally attached to them and can reread them with a different perspective.

I have folder stuffed with early drafts.  Unfinished, fragmented, and raw.  Why do I keep them?  I feel that for a writer its okay to be a hoarder.  There's no way to know what nugget of dialogue will make it to a finished scene.  Sometimes months or years after writing something you stumble upon it and it sparkles a fresh stream of thinking or reignites the original fire behind it.  When you have forgotten even writing it, that's the best.

Another important thing to remember: Never show anything to anyone while its still in development.  It's unfair to all parties involved.  A kind word from a friend can easily distract you.  A tiny bit of criticism from a relative is enough to stall your efforts or worse, sabotage you completely.  Case in point, back in May of 2010 I was about 70 pages in to what I thought was a good story about a newly divorced woman in her senior years.  It came from the complaint I've heard repeatedly from actresses that there aren't any really good parts for women and certainly not women over forty.

I want to create a character and situation people want to see but Hollywood (in its mad rush to make a gazillion dollars) just isn't listening.  I made the mistake of showing my infant script to someone close to me for feedback.  In hindsight, I ask myself, how could I have been so stupid?  Feedback on what?  I wasn't even close to finished yet.  None of my characters were fleshed out enough to evoke any sense of compassion in the reader.  Plot points were still loosely conceived, scenes were out of place or incomplete.  It was still in that messy "first draft on paper" stage.  The reaction wasn't good and worse still, I let it sit on the back burner for months, feeling dejected.  What a set up!  But that's what we writers do to ourselves.  Learn to keep your creative process to yourself until the right time.  Rewriting and editing will come later.  It's a distinct process.  A wonderful book on the editing process is The Forest for the Trees by Betsy Lemer.

There is a time for criticism, feedback and polish and there's a time for free-association, wild abandon and creative exploration.  Mixing the two approaches can have hazardous consequences.  The need to create something perfect may keep you from creating anything at all.  Perfectionism is another way of keeping yourself blocked.  It sounds so reasonable, so admirable: "I'm a perfectionist."  But, the truth is if you wait to write something perfect, it'll never happen.  You'll never write anything.  Perfect doesn't exist.  No one writes a pretty first draft.

Give yourself permission to excavate the depths of your psyche.  What may come up initially isn't pretty but like that crusty sedimentary earth that covers gold, our first drafts are valuable layers of raw elements that with time and care may bear or reveal unexpected fruit.



This week's suggested website: (www.finaldraft.com) Final Draft is a screenwriting program available for both Windows and Mac.  It's easy to use and recognized as the industry standard.

This week's writing prompt:


Give yourself five uninterrupted minutes of quiet time.  Imagine a specific locale.  It can be a cabin in the wilderness, a corner office in a skyscraper or any other location from a script or novel you're working on.  Close your eyes and try to capture every detail.  Be sure to include your sense of smell, taste and touch to describe the environment as well.   Write for five minutes.