the jugular.

Go for the jugular. This was the advice of Peter Christopher, late author, teacher and friend. Described by his peers as one of the bad boys of fiction, I remember him as a charismatic, slightly rumpled realist who just wanted someone, anyone, in our class to stand up and shock the ever living shit out of him with their story. He was not easily impressed, not by a long shot, but what made him exceptional was that he was always willing to be impressed. 


This is what I learned from him. Some of these things I knew before I met him, but even those he taught me how to make better, how to make beautiful. 


Begin with a brick. A small piece of the construction, but a heavy piece to drop through the silence of a page.


Show the story, don't tell it. He would cross out adverbs, eliminating them like rats trying to chew through the walls of literature. Don't say that the wind is blowing, show the reader the rattle of the branches, shaking like a skeleton to shed its rotting skin.


People don't speak in paragraphs. Dialog is an art. Wielded wisely, it can make the mediocre great. It is often less about what is being said and more about what is not being said. The unspoken and the unspeakable often reveals a great deal about people (characters). He mentioned the screen writer Aaron Sorkin as an excellent example of what to do. If you're not familiar, go watch the first four seasons of The West Wing for which Sorkin was the primary writer. Hell, go watch it again even if you've seen it before. It will teach you a thing or two about how to write dialog even if you're penning a novel and not a television show.


Go for the jugular. Pull no punches. Dive in head first. As Christopher's friend and colleague, Eric Nelson, wrote of him, There was an intensity to his writing that was like a slap in the face – the kind that says “wake up, the world’s on fire.” This intensity, this ultra-real style of writing, is exactly what Christopher meant every time he ordered us to go for the jugular. 


The written word can save the world. Enough said.

christine's interruption.

I am writing this between Playwriting class and Screenwriting Lab, instead of doing my homework. I'm doing this both as a testament to my passion for a good rotgut discourse, but also to my passion for procrastination. My esteemed colleague here at Guerilla Ink asked me to talk a bit about writing, but true to my contradictory nature, I have decided not to. I will, instead, talk about story. Which is, in fact, very different.

Writing isn't so hard. Sure, beautiful language is important and multi-dimensional characters that really move and sweep through a world, those are necessary. But all of that amounts to a dictionary, a thesaurus, a few glasses of gin and a joint -- the story, though, now that's a pain in the ass.

In my eight months or so of graduate school, I have been asked to write at least a gagillion (real number) stories. It always starts off well -- okay, so we have a space pirate, in space, and she gets stuck in the middle of a civil war.

Good premise. But that's not yet a story.

Well, the Civil War is between Earth and its Colonies, and there's this Revolutionary, right? And he's really awesome, but kind of a pain in the ass, and so the pirate gets hired to kidnap him and she decides to sell him to the highest bidder.

Great, so there's a complication or two in there. But where's the story?

It goes on and on like that, round and round, in circles, until you've kind of looped it all about yourself, tied your own noose and you're hanging in it, story-less, but with a really exhausted brain.

They tell you story is conflict. Well, yes. But story stems from conflict. And if you determine your specific conflicts, and how they interlock and define your specific characters, and how those characters change, specifically, in order to rise to the conflict you've set before them -- then, THEN, you begin to have a story. This, my friends, can take YEARS. Draft after draft after draft -- of not writing, no -- of outlines, and freewrites, and just trying to get from point A to point Q, and how A causes Q to even happen, because your protagonist decided that A was her best choice, instead of B, which ends up being a better choice, but at what cost? The cost is D, brought about when the protagonist tripped over C, though she ends up landing in E, and from there, well...you know the alphabet.

At the end of the day, is what I'm saying, you aren't writing, you are storytelling.

And by the time you actually sit down to write, it's like coming up for air after diving into the deep end of a pool -- a gasp of realization, a wondrous moment of bursting, because you already know this story so well, these characters like your family, and they may surprise you, but you have constructed for them the best possible venue in which to spotlight all their quirks and flaws and glory.

That's how we do it in theatre, and on screen, anyway.

The actual writing is like the prize you win for doing all of the other work -- but without that work, you'll end up tearing your hair out and hurling your laptop into a wall when, at page 60, the entire story has fallen to pieces and you have no idea why. Then you figure out why -- and if only you'd seen it coming. It's because the story wasn't right, kid. It's because the story didn't suit the characters, didn't push them to their own limits -- it's because you did not spend time learning them, and how to expose them, and all their conflicted awesomeness.

Conflict. Internal, external. A sense of rising conflict, and the cost of each step forward as the protagonist struggles to achieve her goal, and heal her wound. Sometimes these two things are divergent, and she must either attain, fail to attain, or alter her goal in order to satisfy -- not just her, or me, the writer, but you, the audience. I've taken you this far, I owe you one hell of a resolution. Or you'll never buy the DVD.


This concludes our dispatch from the Future.

pen pretension.

A friend recently made the comment to me that writing about writing causes them to feel like a pompous ass. For the obvious reason that this entire blog is me (or the unsuspecting guest writers) writing about writing, this gave me a moment's pause. It was then I realized I agreed with her. It does make me feel like a pompous ass and maybe it damn well should. Yet I am fully aware I have no more than the next person to feel self-important about and have included a static disclaimer which I will repeat here: this is absolute rubbish, so take it with a shot of whiskey or not at all.


It requires a certain amount of ego to write. You must first dare to consider the possibility that the asylum in your head is worthy of being mapped, that the voices you hear possess enough resonance to find echoes in ink. And if you dare to expect anyone else to actually read what you write, then your ego must be inflated enough to be capable of containing the necessary amount of courage. 

And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise.  The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.  - Sylvia Plath.

I am acquainted with several talented writers who fear, despite their passion for the pen, that their lack of formal education in fiction writing causes them to fall woefully behind the crowd. This is not always true. It harks back to the argument of formal education versus self-education. Yes, there are critics who seem to exist for the sole purpose of denouncing anything not written with massive homage to craft intricacies.


Well, fuck 'em. If it's good, if it reverberates, if it speaks to me in a language I didn't even know my bones could understand, then who gives a damn?


Do you?


If so, this is not for you. There is nothing to see here. Move along, move along and take your pen pretensions with you.