Highlights
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Nobody wants to read your shit. What’s the answer? 1) Streamline your message. Focus it and pare it down to its simplest, clearest, easiest-to-understand form. 2) Make its expression fun. Or sexy or interesting or scary or informative. Make it so compelling that a person would have to be crazy NOT to read it. 3) Apply that to all forms of writing or art or commerce.
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Problems seeking solutions. This is a very powerful way of thinking about the creative process.
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If your job is to find that solution, the first step is to define the problem.
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I knew I wasn’t really writing. Not like real writers wrote. I was sitting in front of a typewriter and pounding out pages, even completing books, but what I was doing had nothing to do with real writing. What was I doing? I was using the act of writing (I should say the sham or simulacrum of writing) as a pretense to plant my own ego on the planet so that I could believe I really existed. Have you ever taken a selfie? That was it. That was what I was doing. It was like what people do today on Facebook and Instagram.
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A real writer (or artist or entrepreneur) has something to give. She has lived enough and suffered enough and thought deeply enough about her experience to be able to process it into something that is of value to others, even if only as entertainment.
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Every trade has its tricks. Here’s one you learn as a writer in Movieland: Start at the end. Begin with the climax, then work backward to the beginning.
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When I first got to Hollywood, I wrote scenes that were “on the nose.” This is the most heinous crime a movie writer can commit. Dialogue that is “on the nose” expresses exactly what is being portrayed non-verbally by the actors.
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American stories buy into (and sell) the American dream—you can be anything you want to be if you’re willing to work for it. And they deal with the American nightmare—what if we try and fail?
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A great epiphanal moment not only defines the stakes and the jeopardy for the protagonist and for the audience, but it restates the theme and answers the question, “What is this story about?”
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We learn by increments. One word, one image, one piece of code at a time.
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A novel is like an acid trip. For the first forty-five minutes you’re thinking, “Hmm, this isn’t so intense. I can handle this.” Then you look down at your hands and flames are coming out of them.
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Theme is what the story is about. Theme is not the same as concept. A concept is external. It frames the material and makes us look at every element of that material from a specific point of view. A theme is internal. When we strip away all elements of plot, character and dialogue, what remains is theme.
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In other words, the power of the protagonist derives directly from the power of the theme and the concept. Who cares if we as novelists don’t have the luxury of casting George Clooney or Cate Blanchett? We can create a starring role by writing it. Write Moby Dick and we’ll have Ahab. Write Crime and Punishment and we’ll have Raskolnikov. Write The Catcher in the Rye and we’ll have Holden Caulfield.
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Cut everything that’s not on-theme. And what you keep, make all of it work on-theme.
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Can you sing the blues? Can you make a shoe? Make it beautiful. Make it fun and sexy and interesting and I’ll buy it. I’ll wear it. I’ll tell my friends about it. Your book, your poem, your movie can even be despairing, as long as it’s profoundly conceived and takes my understanding of life a little bit deeper.