Time to Write

British comedy explained (Mighty Boosh)

If you like your comedy surreal, you will enjoy the New York Times article (with videos) on comedy duo The Mighty Boosh, in which they reveal some of the things they’ve learned since writing an unproduceable pilot for the BBC. If you haven’t seen them, the video samples that accompany the article will let you know whether or not they’re your cup of tea. My guess is if you liked Monty Python, you’ll like these chaps as well.

Multi-tasking, mini-tasking, and why people who are texting on the street are annoying

  Generally, multi-tasking has been shown not to work because in fact we don’t do several things at once, we just cycle back and forth between them. This is why people who are walking down the street and trying to text at the same time don’t do either one well.

 However, there is one time that I have found this alternating useful, and that’s when I’m brainstorming. When the flow stops, sometimes it helps to also have my email window open and take care of a couple of emails and then return to the task. It doesn’t always work but often this frequent switch to thinking of something different means that when I return to brainstorming I quickly have fresh ideas.

 Some people to whom I’ve suggested this said it works for them, too, others say it drives them crazy. The only way to find out is to try it!

What would you risk to be more creative? (Life and death example)

The story of artist Alison Silva puts a new slant on the old question of the relationship between art and madness and how much you are willing to risk to maintain your creativity. As this CBS Evening News brief video reveals, she has a difficult choice to make.

I’m wondering whether for the rest of us there’s another way to achieve this kind of result—perhaps using hypnosis. Aldous Huxley experimented with LSD in the early days, when it was still legal for therapeutic uses, and had some fascinating results, but of course that has drawbacks as well.

Watch CBS Videos Online

Film-Maker Tony Gilroy on the power (and necessity) of surprise

In a long New Yorker profile on writer/director Tony Gilroy, the film-maker emphasizes the importance of reversals--basically, surprises, in screenplays these days.

As the profile writer, D. T. Max notes, "Gilroy believes that the writer and the moviegoing public are engaged in a cognitive arms race. As the audience grows savvier, the screenwriter has to invent new reversals--madder music and stronger wine."

Gilroy pushed this idea to the limit in "Duplicity." It features the same line of dialogue five times, each time with a reversal that suggests a different way to interpret it. There were also elements of it in his very much more successful Jason Bourne scripts (although if you read the article, you'll find out why he hated the resulting movies). He also wrote and directed "Michael Clayton."

Gilroy also believes in strong pacing. Steven Schiff notes that Gilroy writes in spurts. “Dolores Claiborne” and “Duplicity” were each written in about twelve weeks. “He feels fucked up and blocked and crazy for a long time,” Schiff says. “He tortures himself. Then, as it’s coalescing, he sits down to outline, and when he’s outlining he insists on doing it very, very fast — the whole movie he sketches out in, like, four days. I’m sure that during those four days his wife doesn’t see him and no one talks to him. And the reason he does that, he says, is it’s a movie and it has to move fast. ‘I have to write fast. I have to think fast. My fingers have to move fast.’ ”

(Want to write a movie yourself? There's useful information in my book, "Your Writing Coach" and in "Top Secrets: Screenwriting," both available from Amazon and other online and offline retailers.)

Self-publishing or thinking about it? This could mean more money...

 

Could you create a premium edition of your book (assuming you are self-publishing)? Here’s a model from a traditional publisher: to coincide with the 40^th anniversary of the moon landing, Taschen has issued “Moonfire,” a special edition of Norman Mailer’s “Of a Fire on the Moon.” There will be only 1,957 copies, each at $1000. For this you get high-quality photos from the NASA archives, a Plexiglas box container, and a signed, framed copy of a photo of Buzz Aldrin standing on the moon.

 They take the principle even beyond that, with an edition of only twelve that will also include a “certified piece of Moon meteorite.” I don’t know how much these will cost—but it will be plenty!

 What could you add to your self-published book that would add enough value to justify a premium edition? An interesting challenge!

(There's information about writing and publishing your book--for finding a publisher--in my book, "Your Writing Coach," published by Nicholas Brealey and available from Amazon and other online and offline retailers.)

More on getting out of a creative rut--this one takes courage

  Here’s one more way that designers interviewed in How magazine overcome their creative ruts. In this case, it’s Jin Young Lee, a New Jersey free-lancer:

“I have three steps to break out of a creative rut. First, I stop working and clean my apartment. Then, I go out to meet people who are not in the design field. I think you can visualize better when you’re away from the problem. Finally, I come back to my workplace and open a new window and I start fresh from the beginning. I feel people have a fear of starting over when they have to put a stop to the work they have spent much time on. It requires courage. I believe opening a new window offers fresh ideas and sometimes it’s the only way to break out of a creative rut.”

(for more ideas on how to be more creative, sign up for my free monthly Brainstorm e-bulletin. Just send an email request to [email protected])

Change your life with a Cylie Rule (don't miss this one!)

In an article a while back, How design magazine featured a great story which they used to help encourage people to stretch their creativity—but I think it goes far beyond that.

 The story concerned a schoolgirl named Cylie Pastian who developed bone cancer. One thing she was sad about was that her bones were too fragile to allow her to continue playing basketball. In response, the players and coaches at her school in South Dakota invented the Cylie Rule: whenever there’s a foul, anyone recovering from bone cancer has the right to check into the game and shoot her team’s free throws.

 The article suggest you consider what rule in your life or organization inhibits creativity, and then come up with a Cylie Rule to replace it.

 Great idea, and I’d suggest extending it to ask what rule or standard procedure in any part of your life is holding you back and coming up with a Cylie Rule to overcome it. Here’s one example:

• When the dishes and other housework pile up, anyone writing a novel has the right to ask the rest of the family to help out. (If your kids are smart, suddenly they’ll be writing novels, too…)

 Equally important, you can also make up a Cylie Rule that gives you the right to behave in ways that may be more productive or enjoyable:

• When attending a boring event of any kind, a creative person has the right to use his or her creativity to figure out how to get away and do something more enjoyable (or to make the event more entertaining for themselves and maybe for others).

• When stuck in a pattern of interaction with someone else that’s not working, the creative person has the right to interrupt that pattern with something unexpected that will change the nature of the interaction.

If you’d like to share your own Cylie Rules, please leave them in the comments section or send them to me directly at [email protected].

(for regular tips on how to be more creative and productive, subscribe to my free monthly Brainstorm e-bulletin. Just send an email request to [email protected])

More on getting out of a creative rut

Here's another answer from a series of brief interviews How magazine did with designers. One of the questions was, "What's your best way to break out of a creative rut?" Kelly English, who works in Minneapolis, had this suggestion:

"To dive into a new method or discipline where I have no idea what I'm doing--I completely disorient myself. The discovery process of navigating through uncharted territory and developing ideas with foreign tools is always liberating for me."

(My free monthly Brainstorm e-bulletin always features ideas for how to be more creative. You can subscribe by sending an email request to [email protected])

A neat little free tool

I've experiment with how long I can really focus on whatever I'm doing. When it's something creative, like writing or drawing, I usually work in chunks of 45 minutes (or longer if it's really flowing).

However, I've discovered that for admin stuff I work best when it's only 15 minutes at a time (these are all little tasks, like going through paperwork). I don't take a long break inbetween these quarter hours, just long enough to get a drink of water or do a quick answer to an email, etc.

Anyway, a very useful and simple and free tool I've found is the countdown timer at www.online-stopwatch.com. You choose which of the two functions you want (stopwatch or timer), set the time, and press the button. I usually leave the timer on screen, and it also sounds a tone when the time is up.

If you'd like to experiment with timed focus sessions, give it a try.

(There are tips about how to be more productive in my free monthly Brainstorm e-bulletin. To subscribe, just send an email request to [email protected])

How to break out of a creative rut

How, the magazine for designers, asked several of them how they break out of creative ruts. Aya Kakeda, who is a free-lancer based in New York, said:

"I put as much creative and non-creative information in my brain as possible (music, film, books, recipes, travel pictures, who ordered what kind of sandwiches, etc.) and go to sleep.

I mean really, really long and good sleep. Get my brain to sort up things on its own, making weird connections to random info, copying and pasting the stuff I absorbed. And when I wake up, I'm out of the rut."

More tips on this soon.

(This is also the kind of topic I cover in my free monthly Brainstorm e-bulletin. To subscribe, just send an email request to [email protected])

Two writing approaches used by a quirky film-maker

In a previous post, I mentioned Terry Keefe’s Venice magazine profile of Norwegian film-maker Bent Hamer and it was interesting to find that Hamer approached the writing of two of his films in very different ways.

 The first was “Kitchen Stories,” which was based on an actual study done in the 1940’s by a Swedish kitchen appliance company. In the film a researcher is sent to study the kitchen habits of an elderly Norwegian bachelor and bonds with his subject.

 Hamer says, “With ‘Kitchen Stories’ I worked from the inside, to my way out, around a very focused idea.”

 The more recent film is “O’Horten,” a character study of a train engineer who spent forty years on the same route and now is about to retire.

O’Keefe writes that the film “is marked by a number of striking images: a POV shot of someone going down a seemingly unmonitored ski jump at night; a businessman willingly sliding down an iced-over road because it is too difficult to walk on; and another POV shot from the engineer’s seat of a train going through a tunnel…so it comes as little surprise that Hamer constructed his story with various images such as these in mind.”

Hamer says, “…this time, I had to piece it together, and I started from the outside with a lot of loose ends, and then tried to find the center…I didn’t always know where to go.”

 Of course you can combine the two. I’ve been toying with a plot idea that has a very focused concept and I think now the way forward is to free-associate for a while about images and characters before returning to plotting.

(Want to be more creative and productive? Sign up for my free monthly Brainstorm e-bulletin. Just send an email request now to [email protected].)

How to write a good villain (hint: use a mirror)

I’ve mentioned this on the blog before, but I think it’s important enough to repeat: In Writer Magazine, novelist Diana Gabaldon was asked why writers often don’t get their villains right. Her answer, in part:

“First, there is a squeamishness that leads people to be superficial and stereotypical because they don’t want to go deeply into them…The corollary to that is, of course, that they’re not accepting the villain as being a wholly human person; they’re thinking a villain is something other. And they’re not.”

 Here’s the crucial statement:

“You do have to accept them as actual human beings and also as parts of yourself, which is where the emotional honesty comes in.”

I think that being willing to step into the dark space of your self is what distinguishes the outstanding writers. Not comfortable, but essential.

 (If you want to be more creative and productive, sign up for my Brainstorm e-bulletin by sending an email request now to [email protected].)

Do you have to write 'big' movies or books?

In Venice magazine, Terry Keefe points out that Norwegian film-maker Bent Hamer “has managed to develop a worldwide audience with largely character-driven films such as O’Horton and Kitchen Stories, which have visuals and elements that feel very specific to Norwegian, or at least Scandinavian, culture…There is a lesson here for filmmakers [and I’d include novelists] that all you need to find a large audience might already be in your own backyard.

 Hamer agrees, saying, “People talk about ‘big’ films. What is a ‘big’ film? There is some connotation there I don’t understand. What it’s all about is if you can recognize something which is universal and specific in a film. Of course you can talk about pure entertainment, but hopefully there’s something more than that.”

(There's useful information on how to construct your story in my book, "Your Writing Coach," published by Nicholas Brealey, and available from Amazon and other online and offline retailers.)

The truth behind Sark's writing process revealed

I don’t know if you’ve seen any of Sark’s books. They’re colourful, mostly handwritten, with cartoons, puzzles, quotes, and a child-like sense of wonder. It would be easy to conclude that she just dashes these off in a few fun days. The truth, as she revealed in an interview a recent interview, is very different:

 “I realized all of a sudden that people have no idea that I handwrite over a thousand pages for every book, that I do four drafts, and that I work closely with an editor.”

 The moral of the story: you’re struggling, that’s fine—your final product only has to seem effortless!

 (If you want to be more creative and productive, sign up for my Brainstorm e-bulletin by sending an email request now to [email protected].)

Top writer David Milch used this to create great scripts

Molly Childers conducted a long interview with creativity guru Michael Michalko at creativity-portal.com. One of the creativity methods he mentions is coming up with a list or chart of possible elements and combining them randomly to generate ideas. It’s a method I teach in my workshops and it’s explained in my book, “Your Writing Coach,” but I didn’t know that one of the top tv writers, David Milch, used it. Michalko says:

 “Another writer, David Milch [pictured], used the technique to create plots, characters, and stories for “NYPD Blue.” He created a chart that consisted of all the major parts of the story: good guys, bad guys, other characters, weapons, crime, location, etc. Then, he generated long lists of variations for each category and numbered them. He wrote the numbers on slips of paper and put the slips into a box. When he needed an idea for a story, he randomly picked slips from the box to create a series of random numbers (one per category). He then looked up the items corresponding to the numbers and used these random combinations as stimuli for new stories.”

 You can also use it at scene level by listing all the possible locations, all the characters you’ve established, some new potential characters, emotions, etc. and try some different combinations to see which give the scene new energy. It works best when, like Milch, you already have a strong framework that gives you your basic format, your core characters, and the tone. 

(for tips on being more creative and productive, sign up for my free monthly Brainstorm e-bulletin. Just send an email request now to [email protected])