Time to Write

Alvin Sargent on Characters and Story

Some time ago I did an interview with Academy Award-winning screenwriter Alvin Sargent, whose most recent credits are Spiderman 2 and 3 (3's in the works). I thought you might find his comments on character and story interesting:

Do you begin with the emotions of the characters rather than the dynamics of the plot?

Well, I think about what this story means to me, how I am affected by it, how I want to project that on paper. Paper is the great enemy. Getting something from your head onto the page is the hardest part. New writers get ideas and can tell you what they want. They can describe some dialogue in a scene that’s very good, they have a sense of character, of what the scene is about, of how it moves. But then—and this happens to me, too, sometimes—something will happen between the time that you know what to say and decide on how to put it on paper. The problem is that transition to paper somehow or other has to be eliminated. It has to be, I think, as if it were a Xerox machine so that the image moves directly onto the paper. I guess that’s the way I work. I structure later, after I have all this goop from my mind down on paper, just exactly as I feel it, immediate acceptance, not edited and polished in the mind. Don’t prepare something before the paper gets it.

What’s in this goop?

People talking to themselves or with each other, without necessarily any connection to the story. I do a great deal of free-associating. Talk, for pages and pages, I don’t know what’s going on. Several months go by, suddenly you’ve got a big pile of stuff as if it were a basket of material, pieces ready for the quilt. I find something alive—I hope. I think too many people are too organised; they’ve got it all worked out, instead of hearing their characters

What I’ve admired so much in your work is the ‘realness’ of your people. It sounds as if the process of free-association you’ve described really puts you in touch with them.

Over a period of time, I begin to understand them, to think about them not only in terms of where they are in the story. But I’m sure this is the case with most writers. I think about where these people are today, even when I’m not writing…Sometimes I’ll go to bed at night, wonder where they are, how they are, think about the fact that I’ll see them tomorrow. Trouble is, sometimes they don’t show up for work. [Laughter] You go to the typewriter and you say, ‘Where are they? What time is it? Why aren’t they here?’ Sometimes they never come back, so sometimes I fire them.

Do the characters ever surprise you?

Oh boy! You write somebody that you can trust but you don’t know them so well that they can’t surprise you. It’s wonderful! Hopefully, it’s more unpredictable than an audience is prepared for. …If you don’t allow yourself the pleasure of working at it—and that doesn’t mean you have to be as disorganised as I am—then you don’t give yourself the freedom to find the surprises.

Some Thoughts from Francis Ford Coppola

In the Aug. 28, 2006 issue of Time magazine, Francis Ford Coppola answers ten questions. There were two thoughts that I thought were especially worth passing along:

"The ideal way to work on a project is to ask a question you don't know the answer to."

That stands in sharp contrast to a lot of Hollywood movies, where you can tell even from the title that they knew the answer and that you'll know it, too, within the first five minutes of the film.

His other thought is about doing what you can rather than waiting. He says, "I had been hitting my head against the wall for six years on a big, ambitious project, and I realized, well, even if I get this thing where I like it, who's gonna wanna make a movie that's so unusual? It's like being in love with a woman who doesn't want you. So I thought, well, I'll do what Sofia [his daughter, who made Lost in Translation] did and make a more modest film that I can just go out and do."

The film to which he refers is Youth Without Youth, scheduled to come out in 2007. The theme is that of artists who do great work when they are young but then cannot repeat that level of work later in their lives. Obviously a theme of personal importance to the man whose finest hour so far is The Godfather (or maybe Apocalypse Now).

The website for the film is www.ywyfilm.com. It includes a diary, unfortunately containing only a few entries, in which Coppola muses on this a bit and then concludes: "I've begun to think that the only sensible way to deal with this dilemma is to become young again, to forget everything I know and try to have the mind of a student. To re-invent myself by forgetting I ever had any film career at all, and instead to dream about having one."

Writing that Wakes You Up

Sometimes when I feel that my own writing feels a little flat, I find it helpful to read some writing that really zings. Here's one of my favorite passages, written by Tom Wolfe  in “The Peppermint Lounge Revisited." His portrait of some New Jersey teenagers begins:

“All right, girls, into your stretch nylon denims! You know the ones—the ones that look like they were designed by some leering, knuckle-rubbing old tailor with a case of workbench back…Next, hoist up those bras, up to the angle of a Nike missile launcher. Then get into the cable-knit mohair sweaters, the ones that fluff out like a cat by a project heating duct. And then unroll the rollers and explode the hair a couple of feet up in the air into bouffants, beehives, and Passaic pompadours.”

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Whoo! Verbal caffeine!

10 Things Writers Hear a Lot (#10)

Making it Easier With a Metaphor

In my free "Brainstorm" e-bulletin this month, I mention a way of using metaphors to make it easier to deal with a variety of challenges. It's a simple four-step process I’ve come up with and found useful:

1] Pick a challenge or problem;
2] Create a metaphor (or an image, a visual metaphor) for how you’re handling it;
3] Create a metaphor or image for how you’d like to be handling it;
4] Decide what you’d have to do in order to act in a way that fits the new metaphor or image (and then do it!)

I've found this very useful recently because at the moment I'm working on one non-fiction book, two television movie scripts, and one feature script--all with deadlines coming up in a few weeks. The image that automatically came to mind was a crushing group of things, like a bunch of heavy sacks piled on top of one another. Not surprisingly, this didn't lead to a good feeling!

Instead, I came up with an image of four rooms, each containing one of these projects, and imagine myself visiting these rooms one by one, doing the work, then moving on to the next one. To make my actions fit this image, I work on each project for a set period of time, then put it out of my mind and move on to the next one.

In a similar situation, the metaphor you'd come up with might be totally different, but it's the process that's the important thing. Consider giving it a try. (And if you want to receive the bulletin every month, just sign up at my website, www.timetowrite.com. We never sell or share our list and it's easy to unsubscribe if you want to.)

Snails on a Plane!

One-minute parody of a trailor for "Snakes on a Plane"--this time it's snails!

A Message for Writers from Garrison Keillor

Although we are close personal friends, this message from Garrison Keillor didn't come directly to me. Actually, we're not close. Or friends. But I did hear him on the radio a lot so I kind of feel I know him.

The following text is actually from a column in a great publication called Funny Times, which is a monthly collection of cartoons and columns. Dave Barry is another writer they regularly feature. You should check out www.funnytimes.com and consider subscribing--it's only $23 for 12 issues. (End of unpaid commercial.)

Anyway, here's part of what Garrison Keillor writes:

"I have had it with writers who talk about how painful and harrowing and exhausting and ALMOST IMPOSSIBLE it it for them to put words on paper and how they pace a hole in the carpet, anguish writ large on their marshmallow faces, and feel lucky to have written an entire sentence or two by the end of the day...To which I say: Get a job. Try teaching eighth-grade English, five classes a day, 35 kids in a class, from September to June, and then tell us about suffering.

"The biggest whiners are the writers who get prizes and fellowships for writing stuff that's painful to read, and so they accumulate long resumes and few readers and wind up teaching in universities where they inflict their gloomy pretensions on the young. Writers who write for a living don't complain about the difficulty of it."

Amen, Gar. I mean, Mr. Keillor.