Time to Write

A Different Way of Looking

If you're familiar with my book, Do Something Different (Virgin Books) or even just have read some of this blog before, you'll know that I'm a big fan of finding creative new ways of looking at and sharing things, whether that's via writing or art or design. Here's another great example, this one written about at www.washingtonpost.com:

The article talks about Photographer Robert Weingarten's show at Washington, D.C.'s Corcoran Gallery of Art, called "Robert Weingarten: Palette Series." He sought out a number of well-known artists (including Jasper Johns, Chuck Close, and Julian Schnabel) and took extra-close-up photos of their palettes.

Weingarten didn't stick just to the palettes, actually, also taking extra-close-up shots of Ed Moses's sink, R. B. Kitaj's sock, and Robert Kushner's floor.

The shots (taken with a 16.7 megapixel Canon camera with a macro lens) were blown up to 44 by 64 inches. The result: beautiful, colorful abstract images.

The photographer makes no great claims about the significance of these images--just that they are a joy to the eye...and a different way of looking at things.

Opportunities for Scriptwriters

In her editorial in a recent issue of scri(i)pt magazine (www.scriptmag.com), Editor-in-Chief Shelly Mellot wrote this:

"Business-savvy screenwriters are watching developments in new media and how those developments can translate to opportunities. For example, videogames are becoming more and more about the storytelling behind the game, making writers a hot commodity in that industry. DVD releases almost always feature extras about the production, extras which must be scripted. Even popular television shows require extras to be produced for their DVD collection releases. Screenwriters are now being hired to write original content for cell phones, material developed for the Web, virtual reality, and interactive TV. All of these new outlets are creating jobs for writers to develop content and fill the new demands of today's consumers."

I agree with her: in some ways, it's an exciting time with lots of opportunities--but as on any frontier, it will take action and daring to find the profitable paths forward. If you want to make your mark in these new fields you need to get out there now and figure out who the players are, what they want, and how to convince them that you're the one to give it to them.

I'm doing some exploring regarding this myself and will be sharing some of my findings with you on this blog and on the www.timetowrite.com website. Stay tuned!

Sometimes It's Simple

You've probably seen the giant flower paintings done by Georgia O'Keefe. They made her name and sell for huge amounts. It would be tempting to believe that she must have had some special link with nature, that flowers spoke to her soul. (SOUND OF BUZZER--WRONG!). Here's what she said:

"I hate flowers. I paint them because they're cheaper than models and they don't move."

I don't know about you, but I find that very heartening.

Writing and Dreaming

I ran across a reference to Stephen King and how dreams relate to his writing, specifically the novel, Misery (this is from an interview he did with UK journalist Stan Nicholls):

"Like the ideas for some of my other novels, that came to me in a dream. In fact, it happened when I was on Concorde, flying over here to Brown's. I fell asleep on the plane and dreamed about a woman who held a writer prisoner and killed him, skinned him, fed the remains to her pig, and bound his novel in human skin. His skin, the writer's skin. I said to myself, 'I have to write this story.' Of course the plot changed quite a bit in the telling."

This reference was part of a collection of ways that dreams have led to scientific and other breakthroughs, as gathered on the website of a supplement called Brilliant Dreams. It claims that you can improve your chances of lucid dreaming by taking the supplement, which is based on a substance called galanthamine, which is being investigated as a possible treatment for Alzheimer's. I have no idea whether it works--but it's expensive and seems not to be available in the UK.

A cheaper way to take advantage of your dreams is just to keep a pad and pen at your bedside and every morning jot down anything you remember. Over time, you'll find you remember more and more. Who knows, maybe the next Misery is waiting somewhere in your dreams...

Inspiration Everywhere

I was reading the blog of artist Danny Gregory (www.dannygregory.com) and he mentioned this:

"I am drawing from one of my favorite sources, the 1955 yearbook of Spalding Institute of Peoria, Illinois, full of hundreds of well groomed Catholic faces. I have a shelf full of yearbooks, picked up a for a dollar or two at flea markets, and they give me a great range of faces to study, all similarly composed, sharp and clear, covering the 1930s through the 1970s."

It reminded me of how inspirational all kinds of materials from the past can be, for writers, artists, businesspeople--really, anybody. Most things we consider new are really just variations of what's already been done.

One great source of all kinds of material from the past is the New Yorker, and now you can buy a set of DVDs that contain every page of the New Yorker ever printed--all the ads, cartoons, articles, etc., for $63 at Amazon.com or (£42 from selected vendors via Amazon.co.uk). A bargain (and a danger, as well--many hour can just whiz by while you're browsing).

The Return of the Short Story?

The short story is generally regarded to be a dying form, but maybe the mobile phone will bring it back.

The June issue of Writing Magazine (www.writingmagazine.co.uk) mentions a young Japanese author known only as Yoshi, "who handed out flyers to 2000 teen-age girls outside a Tokyo subway station, publicising his story Deep Love. Yoshi used the limitations of the format--such as the text limit of 1600 characters that a mobile phone can hold--to his advantage, writing snappy prose that kept the pace moving and favouring simple language. As a result, Deep Love appealed to those who tended not to read in other formats."

"Within three years, his website had received twenty million hits and Deep Love graduated to conventional print, with sales of over 100,000 and then to the silver screen."

New Work for Writers?

In the July 10, 2006 issue of Fortune magazine, Geoffrey Colvin writes about the imagination economy, saying that to keep wages rising, American workers need to get creative. "Exhibit A in this argument is the iPod," he writes. "Its success was based on imagination as much as technology."

He goes on, "Could that model--expressed already in hundreds of forms, from the carefully created Starbucks environment to Michael Graves-designed toilet brushes at Target--be the new basis of economic success? It's an extremely audacious claim. Left-brain logical rigor has been the foundation of economic growth for more than 300 years..."

Colvin isn't sure that the theory holds water, but adds, "the vision of the right-brain future is also appealing because it plays to America's strengths today. We're falling behind in science and math? Hey, we're awesomely good at creating games, humor, design, story, and other elements of the hypothesized future."

Of course what's required is a mix of left-brain and right-brain (the iPod wouldn't be the success it is if the hardware didn't work, no matter how cool it looks), but it does seem that the appreciation and importance of right-brain thinking is increasing drastically. It may well lead to new ways for writers to use their imagination in the service of many new areas.

Write for Yourself or for the Market?

One of the questions that always comes up when writers or artists talk is whether to write for oneself and hope it will also appeal to the marketplace, or to try to guess what the marketplace will like and use that as a guide. Here's a surprising story of what happened when one artist decided to go her own way:

Young artist Erin Crowe found the face of former Federal Reserve Board Chairman Alan Greenspan interesting, and for two years she painted a variety of portraits of him, based on photos. When she needed to raise some money before going off to graduate school, she decided to try selling some of them. Family friends owned a gallery in New York, and agreed to host a show of her Greenspan paintings.

According to The Artist's Magazine (www.artistsmagazine.com), "...no one was prepared for what happened next. CNBC did a piece on Crowe's gallery show, and it went from moderately successful to sold-out in a few short hours. Bankers, hedge fund managers and other Wall Street types lined up to buy her oil paintings of the famous financial figure."

It's nice to know that sometimes following your own path also pays off in the marketplace...even if it's weird path!

(Ps: there's lots more info about writing on my website, www.timetowrite.com)

Marketing Your Writing: Sometimes Free is Good

I'm sure even if you're not a fan, you've been aware of the Sodoku craze. Seemingly coming out of nowhere, this puzzle has turned into a world-wide phenomenon. It was invented in the 1970s by an Indianapolis architect named Howard Garns. Eventually it got to Japan where it got the name Sodoku, and where a New Zealand puzzle fan named Wayne Gould spotted it. He wrote a computer program for cranking out Sodoku puzzles and rating their difficulty. Here's the part that's of interest to writers, as reported in Time magazine (May 8, 2006):

"He also had a briliant if counter-intuitive marketing model: give the puzzle away. More than 400 newspapers worldwide run his Pappocom sodoku puzzles free in return for promoting Gould's computer program and books. The results must be lucrative, as sales of the books alone have passed 4 million."

Definitely food for thought for authors trying to find new ways to get their work out there!

What Writers Can Learn from Top Photographers (2)

Another tip from top photographer Ken Griffiths is: "Surprise yourself. Take pictures with your eyes closed. Hold the camera away from your body and don't look at what you're taking..."

As writers we sometimes get too obsessed with framing the perfect shot (or scene, or opening, or whatever), so maybe Griffiths' approach can prompt us to find something fresher.

For example, at the moment, I'm writing a TV movie and the opening scene is a father waking up his son in the morning by telling him it's time to get up--kind of a banal situation. Using Griffith's idea, I brainstormed some ways to surprise myself with this scene:
* start with the boy's dream
* have the father wake up the boy with a water pistol-- in turn, this gave me the idea that maybe the boy is already awake and hiding his water pistol under the covers, and this is a long-running thing between the two of them
* having the father send in the family dog to jump onto the bed to wake up the boy
--and a bunch more, but you get the idea.

The next time you're in a similar situation, it could be worth trying Griffiths' 'surprise yourself' approach.

What Writers Can Learn from Top Photographers

Ken Griffiths is a top landscape photographer, and in an interview he recently gave this as one of his top tips: "Take more shots than you need...don't stop, even if you've got the one shot you want...strive to do it better, to get the shot from a different angle."

It occured to me that we writers can learn a lot from photographers. In this case, to try writing a scene several times, shifting our perspective each time. The only way I can do this is to put the first version away and just start over. Otherwise I end up just tweaking the first version and never get the fresh new view.

If you have a scene (or a part of an article) that is not coming alive the way you'd like, or that you suspect could be better, it might be worth a try to just put it aside and take a new shot.

Catch This Movie

I don't usually use this blog to promote films, but once in a while a really good movie gets lost in the shuffle, and I wanted to alert you to one like that: The Proposition (2005/2006). It's an Australian lowish-budget Western starring Ray Winstone, Guy Pearce, Danny Huston and Emily Watson. Quite violent at times, but a fantastic evocation of a time and place (one that will make you very glad you weren't living there then). Excellent acting, outstanding detail in terms of the setting, a classic storyline that echoes a lot of the best Westerns ever made, and economical writing worth study by any aspiring screenwriter.

Amazon.co.uk shows it will be available for purchase on July 17, Amazon.com at the moment only shows it as an (expensive) import. But it's also the kind of film that's going to show up at rep movie theatres and maybe late night cable/satellite. Unfortunately, it was a failure at the box office, but it's well worth a look.

Guerrilla Tactic for Writers

Kevin Smith is employing an unusual tactic to promote his new film, Clerks II. The first 10,000 people adding one of the film's MySpace.com pages to their friends list will have their name on the closing credits. They'll be on a horizontal scroll--my guess is it's going to have to whizz by at about 100 miles per hour. But it's a clever guerrilla tactic. Hmm, maybe I could promise to list the names of the first 10,000 people who pledge to buy my novel when it's published (appendix A, 2-point type...).

It Only Looks Easy

When a master is at work, it always looks easy. What we don't see, most of the time, is the effort that goes into something that seems effortless. Another confirmation of this comes in an article broadcaster and writer John Humphrys wrote for The Times (June 24, 2006) about the great essayist and broadcaster, Alistair Cooke. For many years I enjoyed Cooke's Letter from America as well of his hosting of several series on PBS in America. Here is part of what Humphrys wrote:

"When I watched him, for the first time, record Letter from America, I was shocked. I'd expected the master to saunter into the studio, settle back in a comfortable chair, chat quietly into the microphone for 15 minutes, probably only with a few notes scribbled on the back of a White House invitation, and saunter out again... Instead, Cooke spent an age trying to deliver his words from a script: coughing and spluttering and fluffing his lines, starting and re-starting until I wondered if he'd ever finish. Then his faithful producer--an elderly lady called Lillian...took away the fat reel of tape and stitched it all together. And it was, of course, a masterly piece of radio--one of thousands he delivered during the 60 years the programme lasted."