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Personal Blog - A Writer's Life - by Australis

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Personal Blog - A Writer's Life - September 2006

Crime Time, All The Time!

September 28th 2006 13:52

The idiot’s lantern fills the gloomy room with all manner of fractured imagery. One of those staples is the crime drama, wherein a ne’er-do-well strikes at the fabric of society, and the forces of the law have to track down this pawn of the forces of darkness and administer unto him the full force of justice. Or something.

Are cop shows a cop out? Producers going for the easy answer? Easy because each episode can be filled with some new situation, giving the stern looking heroes another way to clench their jaw and stare off into the distance with a hawklike gaze, as they scan the horizon for their quarry. What annoys me is that each show pushes its edge along, to try and squeeze out a slightly more heinous crime, because if they don’t they’ll start repeating themselves, and down that road lies staleness and cancellation.

Sex crimes. Corruption, all the way to the highest office in the land. Serial killers. Fraud. Murder. Mayhem. Terrorism. Sometimes I think that they put these shows on, and there’s someone sitting out there writing notes in purple ink on floral notepaper in ever decreasing spirals. The criminal mind knows no boundary, apparently. Or at least the mind of a cop show writer knows no boundary, that’s for sure.

To all the producers out there, it’d be nice to have a show with a few different modes. I know you want to sell soap powder and corn flakes, but a little morality and ethics can go a long way. (Now someone’s going to chip me for mentioning Big TV and ethics in the same breath!) Fortunately we have shows like ‘Scrubs’ and ‘Arrested Development’ to rescue us from the gimlet eyes and stressed teeth of the law. More variety now! Bring it on!

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Keep Going

September 22nd 2006 15:26

Some of you are lucky. You have love and support, a safe place from which to struggle with the muse, whether it’s your bedroom, your college dorm, your study or office. Some of us aren’t so lucky, and they’re the people I want to send a message to tonight.

I don’t necessarily mean you’re being abused or beaten. I’m talking to the ones who, when they announce, “I’m going to be a writer”, the reply is usually a small frown, a pause and then, “Yes… but what will you do next?” Or possibly, “Yes... but what do you really want to do?” Own up, there are a LOT of you who have heard those words, aren’t there? They, whoever they are, however well meaning they are, don’t get it. They think this is some kind of passing self expression thing, like writing angsty high school poetry that you rediscover in a box twenty years later, causing you to reel in horror when you reread it.

No, I’m talking real deal. The monkey on the back. The compulsion. The hours spent alone building up a story and cutting it down again, pouring out ideas and notes and chapters and episodes again and again. Further novturnal adventures fiddling with your, er, pen. That’s how bad it can get.

I just want to say something simple to you: keep going. It’ll be hard, the road will be uneven, there will be obstacles. And probably the hardest person to get around, the most obstinate, the one who will create the most obstacles, is the one you see in the mirror every day. Acknowledge it and move on.

I’d like to close with a slightly more eloquent piece of advice from the introduction to a book that comes with a high recommendation, J Michael Straczynski’s ‘Complete Book of Scriptwriting':

“But everyone knows that people like us don’t make it in Hollywood. Your parents, your friends, your teachers, meaning only the best for you, hoping to save you from disappointment and pain, will offer that piece of advice, over and over until you either accept it or go mad. Sitting in a restaurant counter in Cincinnati, standing in a bus chugging down El Cajon Boulevard in San Diego, you, the person reading this book, glance around. The people around you will take one look at the book in your hands and shake their heads. What a dreamer. No offence, but folks like you just aren’t the type to make it in Hollywood, to see your name on the screen or the television tube in front of millions of viewers. Please. Get real. It doesn’t happen that way. Everybody knows that.

“Except… except for one little truth… the one singular and important truth you must keep close to your secret heart, the truth I learned, the truth I hope to pass on to you.

“Here it is. Ready?

“Everybody is wrong.

“Keep writing. Keep fighting. Keep dreaming. Because sometimes, every once in a while, the dream really does come true.

“Even for folks like us.”

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The Journal - A Tool And A Friend!

September 11th 2006 13:57

A journal is, apparently, a good idea. Some are basically diaries, some are deeper, a catalogue of daily events of not just he writer’s life but the world around them. Then there are things like, say a ship’s log, which is basically its journal. Australia would be a much poorer place without the log of the Endeavour or David Collins’s Account of the English Colony (or to give it the full title (deep breath)… “An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales, Vol. 1, With Remarks On The Dispositions, Customs, Manners, Etc. Of The Native Inhabitants Of That Country. To Which Are Added, Some Particulars Of New Zealand; Compiled, By Permission, From The Mss.Of Lieutenant-Governor King.”). These are day to day books, listing the many things that happen to a group of people in extreme situations. Collins was one of the primary sources for the Mary Bryant story, but is a fascinating book beyond that.

I could never be bothered with a diary. I did too many embarrassing things as a teenager I’m still trying to live down (and I’m in my 40s now!), but I found I was coming up with all these stories I didn’t have time to write, they were seeping out of my head, forgotten and by all unmourned. So I started writing them down as sets of notes, anything from a heading, a logline half a paragraph, up to pages and pages of character and plot notes, with potential sequel storylines, even in one case, filling an entire small A5 book with just one story. To try and keep track of what idea was where, I indexed all the headings on the first inside page as a mnemonic (hopefully) and numbering each book. Because I had this constant stream of ideas, I called the series Notes From The Flow, and while the first few are missing, which were those very small notebooks and a couple of A5s, latterly they’ve been A4 or foolscap size, filled cover to cover, and there’s about twelve of them. If I never had another original idea again, I could go back to these and find a wealth of starting points. Recently I’ve delved into them and combined a couple of different, not-so-interesting ideas, into something better, and that’s the beauty of these kind of journals, you don’t have to remember it all, and you can reassess the ideas at different times in your life, saying “that idea I wrote at 22 isn’t all that good, but knowing what I do now, if I add this component to it, it’ll be much better”. And sometimes the idea you had for a novel then, you realise later might make a better short story or script.

And of course for the younger, hipper person who’s on a PC or laptop, you have the perfect notebook at hand, because later you can cut & paste ideas all over the place! And even better if you have a tablet, because you can handwrite it, then store it as text! brilliant! But paper has one advantage – it’ll never crash. Keep backups. But I digress (again).

So buy a notebook, and start filling it. Character studies, poetry, one-sentence movie ideas, notes for a novel, pour everything in there! Worried someone might steal it once it’s on paper or disk? See my post on Wednesday in the Scriptwriting Blog about Ideas.

And a journal is your friend. It'll look after your stories while you have to do all that mundane real world stuff, it won't blab your ideas all over, it gives you links between those different ideas, and you can tell it whatever you like, no mattter how crazy, and it doesn't criticise.

At the very minimum you won’t have to carry all those ideas round in your head any more…

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Favourite Authors - an occasional series

September 6th 2006 14:31

I said in an earlier post you need to read everything you can find. This occasional series will point out authors you may not have come across. The main thing about the ones I will mention is they really know how to tell a story. And what the hell? You need to put your feet up and let the brain do the work for a while!

Robert Goddard is the writer I describe as ‘Agatha Christie for grown ups’. The plots twist like knotted string, and the characters are often multi layered and deeper than they first appear

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Riches and Focus

September 4th 2006 11:55

The big problem I have is, of course, trying to justify the time I spend reading, watching, watching something else, reading more, thinking. Because I am a bit 'plugged in' to the modern world, and all it seems to do is offer up riches.

TV comedy is the best it's been in years, whethter UK or US. Same with the drama. Movies wax and wane a bit, but there is such a range of choice, from the romp of 'Pirates of the Caribbean' and 'Snakes On A Plane' to the draker and more serious like 'The Wicker Man', 'United 93' and 'Twelve Monkeys', and that doesbn' even include the European, Sth American ior Africa films. Or the Chinese. Hell good film's bursting out everywhere

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The Writing Space

September 1st 2006 10:57

While all writers approach their vocation from different angles and different levels of work ethic (though at some point sweating blood is involved, and the heavy lifting is all mental and very tiring), there is one thing the first criteria, maybe even before a typewriter or word processor.

You need a space. Anywhere from a spot at the dining table after dinner or before breakfast (for starting right now), all the way up to an office or house some distance from home to minimise distractions (for the full-on professional). It seems that the routine of going to that place and sitting and shaping your worlds gets easier each time, because the mind learns to focus in specific ways

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January 2007

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November 2006