Way of the Warrior Writer
As part of my heightened awareness of the necessity for social media for writers, I finally crossed out an ancient, long-ignored point on my To Do List: JOIN TWITTER. I’ve barely used it, mostly because I follow a frightening number of writing-based accounts between which I could literally spend ALL DAY following their fascinating and educational links. I thought Face Book was bad enough; Twitter is so much the worse evil in the fight against (albeit constructive) procrastination.
But on one of my rare visits to that realm of delightful distraction, I followed a link to Kristen Lamb’s Warrior Writers blog at http://warriorwriters.wordpress.com. She’s so good that she’s probably cost me a couple of thousands of words in writing time, but I’ll totally forgive her that because she’s so good she’s probably also saved me another ten aaaargh-aaaargh-aaaaargh drafts on The Sinless Sword. A morning spend reading her Structure series for free has already given me more to work with than the last 38 days on the Re-write course I’m paying to take part in (cue Finance Minister going into revolt).
If you’re a writer, get over there now. Like, NOW. As far as I understand, Warrior Writers is nominally a site for teaching writers about social networking but it’s a goldmine for understanding why stories (novels, film, TV, shorts, anything) do and don’t work as well. Her blogs are not only illuminating but well entertaining to boot, and dotted with illustrative images.
Like this one. Which I considerably appreciate right now.
So this morning has involved answering the questions raised in Kristen’s Structure series, which has involved some epic face-palm action on the part of yours truly. Her excellent I’LL USE A WHOLE LOT OF CAPS JUST TO MAKE SURE YOU’RE GETTING THE POINT article on the logline – pitching your story in one single bloody sentence and one sentence only no matter how long you can talk in one breath – caused no small about of face-plant-on-table action in the Starbucks basement this morning.
Insomniac non-writers, I have a cure. Seriously. Go ask someone you know who’s writing something to explain their story to you. It would be my pleasure to put you to sleep any time you like. Call me at 11pm, I can waffle with the best of them until your brain screams and shuts down comatose style. This is partly because I’ve been “writing” (read: planning, dreaming about, jotting notes over and doing pretty much everything except actually writing) The Sinless Sword for years now. And in a gestation time that long, an awful lot changes. And when there’s no solid opening premise, you’re literally making the whole thing up as you go – which is fine and wonderfully creative – but there’s a point where you have to stop flying by the seat of your pants and say ‘sorry, can you run that by me again, in order this time?’
Then I actually wrote the damn thing last year, and in an intense writing period, it changed again. And again. And again.
Now I’m rewriting it, and you know what? It still keeps changing. Even if I’d had one line to throw at you last year (which as your guaranteed insomnia-cure, I didn’t) it would be amazingly different to this clumsy, frustrated sentence that bled out from considerable bashing-head-on-table this morning:
An orphan boy experiencing the incarceration of his guardian through nightmares must face the man who destroyed his family before the dream-connection kills them both.
So it has WHO (Lien) does WHAT (face his past – bit weak, needs work) AGAINST (the man who destroyed his family – yeah, I hear ya, my head is screaming ‘Harry Potter alert!!’ too but it’s an old story, told many times and told here differently) and WHY (to save his life: Arete’s death will kill Lien too).
Yeah baby, if you’ve ever read any of this book, I know you’re going ‘What the hell? Where did that come from?’ right now. Me too! WTH?!!
But now I have a conflict lock to beat the crap out of my draft with. And a really lovely but completely redundant prelude. Speaking of locks, in an article on testing your book’s story, Kristen references James Scott Bell’s LOCK system, which I paraphrase here:
LEAD with a sympathetic and compelling character whose OBJECTIVE is interesting clear and active but continually crushed by escalating CONFLICT which is resolved with a KNOCKOUT ending. An ending that resonates and rewards the reader’s time investment in your book.
Ok, ok, I know this stuff! I do! It’s not new!
…it’s just…
…it’s just that I can’t remember the birth dates of any of my best friends, ever, so I really don’t remember every single writing rule, however basic. I need reminding.
So thank you Kristen for a number of excellent reminders.
(…I just wish I’d got my ass onto Twitter and seen them a whole lot earlier…)
CoLab: Words, Spoken
For a new writer, there’s something unsettling about first hearing your work read: it’s a moment of collision between intent and outcome. Which makes it frankly surreal to first see your work performed. By actors. People who have (in this case) voluntarily committed their time to take words you have written and birth them into the world. The good folks at newly formed performance group CoLab (Constellation Creatives) are giving new writers the opportunity to experience this terror – and one hopes, consequent thrill – firsthand.
[NB in case you made the unfortunate decision to read my recent double face-palm blog about the Constellations workshop, CoLab has absolutely nothing to do with writers play-acting and attempting psychiatric assessments of, well, me. Same name, totally different group. Just for the record.]
SYNOPSIS: When his violent, thick Conan rip-off character and a half-imagined monster blunder into the real world, a pulp comics writer must overcome his writers’ block to give depth to his character and shape to the monster, before the two of them can wreck vengeance on their ‘creator’.
You see, until the point of performance, your work consists of worlds, characters and dialogue that exist only in your head – your own private cinema where every scene is every kind of awesome. And then you email your world to a group of strangers who haven’t had the privilege of taking a seat in your cinema. Using only what’s on the page and in their own heads, they interpret your characters and speak your lines and you, the writer, have no idea how this is going to work out.
First you might wonder: will they understand? Will they grasp the awesomeness of this concept? Will they feel a connection to and for my characters?
Then you might wonder: what if they don’t get it? What if I have to pull out the old Picard facepalm – or less conspicuously, watch with a look of distant disdain, removing any possible association with the unfolding disaster?
And that’s a dangerous place to get to – and remember, I’m still talking speculatively here, because it’s a writer’s job to imagine every worst possible outcome before an event – because it leads in one of two directions. You can dismissively decide that the acting stinks… or you realise, with stomach-turning terror, that the upcoming performance might just demonstrate to a live audience that your writing stinks. And when you have a group of experienced actors like CoLab offers taking the stage, the latter is much more likely to be the case.
Now I can’t talk for all writers here, but my relationship with writing swings schizophrenically between honestly believing that what I’m working on will one day be completely brilliant… and honestly suspecting (or, memorably, being told) that it’s absolute rubbish. The fact that the creative process involves continual revision doesn’t help. For any finished book you read or film you see, there were earlier drafts the writer was sincerely proud of, only to later realise weren’t so hot after all. I exist exhaustingly juxtaposed between confidence and despair.
It will always be like that, for me. A lot of the best times I have with my writing involve just me and my laptop and a small bucket of gingerbread latte. The despair almost always arrives with the intrusion of the real world on the imagined world. But then I found CoLab – or rather, Artistic Director Orion Lee found me, pitching a TV series at BAFTA – and I’ve now had two immensely positive experiences with my work being birthed into the world through the mouths of others.
The first was a read workshopping of a pilot for Violent Cases, which mostly involved me grinning like an idiot because of course the actors didn’t stink – quite the opposite, they were fantastic and generous and enthusiastic – and although bits of the writing did stink, bits of it came out even better than I’d written them. My world and the real world met, no-one died, and I came out with more ideas and excitement than I’d gone in with.
The second was last Tuesday, where just five minutes of a much older hobby project had a staging for the second CoLab Performance Evening at the Hospital Club, Covent Garden, London. Now few if any TV scripts have scenes of five minutes in length that can be coherently ‘performed’ live, so I riskily took three scenes and sewed them together – which resulted in at least two glaring logic holes that I picked – pressed SEND and hoped for the best. The script is farce. The characters spend a lot of 60 minutes being fairly 2D and that’s part of the transformational process of the story. The actors weren’t seeing a whole script: they were seeing five aggregated minutes. Would they get it? Would it translate? Would it be funny-ha-ha or a car crash?
I had a drink of wine on the night, I was that nervous.
In the end, I didn’t need to be.
Three quality actors (Rob Heaps, Kosha Engler and Orion Lee), with minimal rehearsal and no input from me and my personal cinema, birthed my characters and words into the world. I love them so much for giving themselves in the way they did.
No-one died. People even laughed, and said very nice things afterwards. I have been tentatively approached to write a short film for the 2011 London Film Festival, been emailed by a producer and am looking at a future collaboration with some of the actors. I have ammunition and confidence with which to re-write the script to submit to the slush pile for the BBC Radio 4 Afternoon Play 2012. Face-palming was not required.
And actually… I’m kind of addicted to this whole performance thing. Actors rock my world. Actually, they take my world and rock it out for other people. Any time you give writing to someone else to read, whether for pleasure or performance, they make it their own. And strange as that can sometimes be for a writer, writing is ultimately about sharing. It’s not just about sitting in Starbucks with a stupid smile on my face typing away – it’s about hoping that writing will bring a smile, or grimace, or intended facepalm – or hell, tears – to someone else’s face. I write because I need to write, but what I want is to share.
Writers wanting to submit stage/TV scenes of up to 7 minutes length or request a dedicated workshopping of their script by CoLab – or actors/directors/producers wanting to stand on the soapbox to pitch for collaboration at the next performance night – can contact Artist Director Orion Lee at orion_lee@hotmail.com.
Do it.
Cartoon Crushes
I am also a fan of The Smoulder. Oh yes.
Meet my current desktop. It’s an awful distraction. Every time my right ring finger accidentally strikes F11, there he is, my new love: at the outset a selfish, egotistical, brigand of a man but worse of all, a damn cartoon, which is probably a good Ha Ha drop down from my life-long crush on the Doctor, but do I care?
No.
The cornerstone principle of fandom, according to Armilleri & Kennant, is that THERE IS NO SHAME. As far as we’re concerned, in the absence of real love in our lives, we can swoon over whoever else the hell we want. Right now, I’d quite like a Flynn Rider and the horse he rode in on, thanks ever so much.
So yes, I enjoyed Tangled, to the slightly worrying point that I’m now going obsess over it until I have the time to see it again. Which, knowing my schedule, should be, oooo, in a month or so.
Dammit.
…it’s less morally evil to Pirate Bay when you’ve already paid for a cinema ticket and have pre-ordered the DVD on Amazon…. right…?
Trashing Trailers
My kind of cheese
So I’m at Vue between teaching spin at GymBox and hitting the flicks, and where the ambient soundtrack is starting to freak me out. Since discovering trailer-specific artists like Two Steps From Hell, X-Ray Dog, Immediate Music, Globus and Epic Score, suddenly every single film trailer sounds like a track from my spin classes. I’ve just realised that the cinema has become as corrupted as the radio, where every second song belongs in a Les Mills fitness class and you’re constantly fighting the desire to break into inappropriate exercise routines in the middle of supermarkets… malls… clothing stores… dance clubs… your car… the Home Office…
That’s the good news. The bad news is that I’ve sat myself, my laptop and my daily 1,500 word objective facing Vue’s preview screen, which is a Terrible Idea as I now proceed to ‘not watch’ the trailer loop. I’m trying to use i-tunes to block out the sound of the trailers, to reduce their distraction factor. So far, not an astounding success; for instance while working very diligently on this blog post I’ve just ‘not watched’ the preview for Never Let Me Go, which I knew nothing – and still know very little – about, but feel the need to research anyway.
*wikipedias Never Let Me Go – depressed now but still interested*
Oh dear, there’s a film coming called Gnomeo & Juliet. Excuse me? You can just see the pitch, can’t you?
SCRIPT WRITER: ‘It’s a comedy-caper re-imagining of Romeo & Juliet, updating this classic Shakespearean tale for a younger audience.’
EXECUTIVE: ‘Er, hasn’t Romeo & Juliet been done to death?’
SCRIPT WRITER: ‘Ah yes – but not with garden gnomes! And not without the death either!!’
EXECUTIVE: ‘Brilliant!!! And we’ll call it… Gnomeo & Juliet!!!!’
I mean it’s a family animation, what are they going to do, kill the gnomes? Or not kill the gnomes, which is even lamer?
Ah, interesting, I just didn’t-see the trailer for The Kings Speech, which made me rather glad I didn’t see it before I saw the film either, because it has just given away the entire two hours of plot and emotional beats (crisis requiring resolution, gathering of the fellowship/friendship, fun & games, betrayal, dark night of the soul, but oh wait, everyone’s happy at the end!!). If not for the fact it was so exquisitely executed, I wouldn’t really see the point of seeing it post-trailer, to be honest.
[If you’re interested in trailer breakdowns, the good folk over at Movie Vortex are now doing analyses of upcoming trailers, which can be seen here. Mel Gibson’s The Beaver makes for a particularly interesting conversation.]
Now I also know hardly anything about Tangled, and having just not-seen the trailer without sound, I fear it does look awful. But HOLY CRAP there’s a smurfs movie? And Yogi Bear? Justin Bieber has an autobiographical film out? Look, I’m practically a closet fan to the point of having watched the video to Never Say Never a few times more than once, and hell, the kid is doing well, but they better hope he’s not going to go off the rails like Billie Piper, Britney et al, or in a few years this film is going to be all kinds of awkward.
Now there’s something about some blue parrots bouncing off ladies’ ample butts on a beach. Rio? And i-tunes is playing the Voyager theme at me. While Rio bounces off ladies butts. This is frankly too much.
Talking of too much, there goes Peter Weir’s The Way Back, which looks like an immensely bleak two hours at the cinema. The trailer talks of nothing but death and suffering – and I can’t even hear a damn thing of it through a playlist that’s jumping through Dark Knight, Scooter and Enya. There’s not even the sort of uplifting montage you get at the end of a trailer to say ‘don’t worry, there’s a happy ending’, which means you’ll probably want to kill yourself by the time the lights go up. As opposed to Gnomeo & Juliet, for which you’ll probably already be borderline suicidal to even enter in the first place.
*Wikipedias The Way Back: right, now that’s proper Shakespearean tragedy*
Well would you look at that, it’s now time for Tangled. Total word count on the rewrite? 365 words. That’s tonight totally knackered. But for now… bring me Disney.
Once more with feeling
Back in the day – a day in January of last year, to be exact – I said I’d write a book by the end of the year.
On 29 November 2010, while sitting in a pub in Wincanton listening to folk band Lavington Bound and digesting a conversation I had just had with Terry Pratchett, the extreme magnitude of my failure hit me.
So I wrote a book in December.
It’s called The Sinless Sword. It’s a teenage/YA fantasy novel about a boy who goes searching for his destiny, finds it, runs the hell away from it but has his ass kicked by it anyway, because Destiny is a right old sod.
Well, I wrote most of it in December. The target was 80,000 words, of which 72,000 of book were writ along with 10,000 words of diary (I write to myself. Mostly as a method of keeping sane – and I’ll leave you to decide the success of that exercise). So that’s 80,000 words written, right?
This was not me. I did not kick ass.
There were also 40,000 words written earlier in the year and written off so badly by a friend that I stopped writing. For almost a fortnight. Yeah, precious, I know, hand me that violin and I’ll make your ears bleed.
A small digression: I backed myself into a corner a few weeks ago telling some writer friends that the critique ‘made me feel…[insert self-defeatist metaphor of your choice]’. They pulled me up with a sharp ‘hang on: who made you feel like that?’ A writer tripping myself up on my own words: for shame, I should know better.
Constellations
Applying family therapy to scripts: in reverse.
Which turned into Applying Adele’s Script to Investigating her Psyche.
All in another interesting afternoon at BAFTA…
Ok, so it's not a *real* constellation, but pegasus is cool.
I have a script which can be accurately described as stuck. Hell, I have two scripts and a book in various states of stuckedness, but Life in Me is categorically in a State of Stuck.
One of the reasons, as pointed out by a friend in several pages of notes and 20 minutes of protesting over the phone (I was blissfully unaware of all this, you see), might be that I’m warping the narrative of the story out of shape by assuming that it’s Sienna’s story… when maybe, just maybe, it belongs to Rael. The Batman comics and films sure as hell ain’t called ‘Bruce Wayne’ and for a damn good reason.
Am I telling the wrong story by using the wrong protagonist? Is that why I got through draft after draft and still can’t get the wretched thing right?
Picard has the highest number of google hits for Face Palm pics 
So I’ve had this dropped on me and while I commit an ongoing face-palm and wallow in creative despair (which is a place dark somewhere between self-loathing [I’m an idiot, I’ll never be able to do write anything worth a damn, you need actual talent for that, blah blah blah self surrender blah’] and self-doubt [maybe this is just rubbish, always has been, always will be, and perhaps I’m just wasting my whole life and will fail as miserably as a writer as I did as a dressage rider woe is me et cetera]) Pippa randomly sent me a link to a workshop called Scripts Unstuck.
That’s like, fate or something, right? You’ve got to sign up for something like that when writing has devolved from a work of genius into a car crash in front of your disbelieving eyes.
I (won’t) Surrender
Life lessons learned from kicking ass
This is not me. Although I sometimes pretend to be Rachel, this is the real deal.
I’ve just started teaching Body Combat 46, which features Cadence’s I Surrender. It’s the last power-training track, the finale where you storm your class home in a furious battle of adrenaline vs fatigue. It’s a stompingly epic track, all the more so for instructors because of the performance given by Combat program director Rachel Cohen.
For the uninitiated, the Les Mills body training systems (Combat, Balance, Pump, Attack, Step etc) are ‘relaunched’ every quarter with new tunes and choreography. Instructors are provided with the music and a masterclass DVD where the program directors present the new moves. Across the Les Mills training systems the DVDs presentations vary from cheese-tastic to cringe-worthy to inspirational. Sometimes you laugh, sometimes you watch between your fingers and never show the damn things to anyone else, ever – and sometimes you watch these masterclasses and think: I have the best freaking job in the world. How did I get so lucky?
In Combat 46 Rach gives an inspired performance. She doesn’t talk technique; she doesn’t talk Body Combat/Les Mills PR crap. She just relates what she’s doing on that stage to her life, to all of our lives, in very real terms. She’s a role model to thousands around the world: to the instructors who model their teaching on her or through those instructors to the people who pack out exercise studios every day of every week in 75 countries around the world.
Bagpipes: MIA
It’s Ed Fest 2010, I have 90 minutes invaluable work time in which the 3Ness article urgently requires revision and 40 pages of script even more urgently require being written. Which is probably why I’m uploading very silly photos of Cec’s farewell to Facebook and writing an entirely un-urgent blog instead. Yes, I am that bad.
Here’s the view from my window in Starbucks on the Royal Mile . Yes, I’m in Edinburgh – one of the most beautiful UK cities, retaining not only its unspoilt character but also its centuries of hard accumulated dirt – in Starbucks – but I am not ashamed because there are coffee shops here with whole lists of how to behave on their premises with laptops – ie don’t bring them in and take up valuable seating space for hours on end while consuming one small latte – so there. I’m here, I have a power point (an item conspicuously missing from the hostel room) and an apparently charmingly ancient table that wobbles worse than me after half a glass of wine.
Anyway, improvements on last year’s trip include not living with a madman Braveheart impersonator plus claymore – I’m still absolutely paranoid that I’m going to run into Jon somewhere on the Royal Mile, this city surely can’t be big enough for the two of us, even during Festival – and living right under the castle. And having an iPhone so I can plan on the run and even remain more or less found (as opposed to perpetually lost) when unaccompanied by navigator/nominated adult Poppy. She’s currently in a real cafe, you know, a small family business type that probably has better coffee but would frown upon me, my Wonder Woman shirt, the unavoidable hunt for a table near a power point and the unpacking of the laptop. Read more…
3Ness: Booiaka!
Slogans are in. On the bikes it was all about ‘don’t just ride, feel the Vibe!’ Saturday’s highlight, when I was awake, was jumping around, shaking my ass and shouting ‘Booiaka!’ No, I don’t know what it means either, but trust me, that stopped no-one.
But my enthusiasm for Booiaka has me running ahead. Saturday was the morning of the alleged 6:30am run ‘with all presenters’, dubiously advertised as a ‘pain free morning activity for all before breakfast’. Let’s be fair: I was at 3Ness to experience the event. If the poor presenters had to be out of bed at 6:29am, I could be too. And besides, Paul had arranged a wake-up phone call to every single participant for 6am.
Some people thought he was joking. I didn’t. I took my phone off the hook, set my alarm for 6:20am and justified an ‘early’ (ie midnight) bed time, sans party, based on an early morning. By 4am, when I still hadn’t slept a decent wink in the last four hours, I changed my alarm for 7:30am. Turns out my dedication has limits.
So I missed the early morning run, but by the sounds of things, so did most people and most presenters. A lot of people did not miss the 6am wake up call though.
As I dragged my sorry sleepless carcass to breakfast, I passed a dude working up to Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine physique (fortunately minus sideburns) telling his mate about this immensely painful massage he’d endured on the Friday. The masseuse in question had hands of steel, if he was to be believed. Naturally I immediately concluded: I gotta get me one of them. 3Ness offers any number of pamper treatments, and it was my job, after all, to experience such delights. I made a booking for that afternoon. Read more…