ON THE OPINION OF A WRITER

So, the viewing marathon is over and my ballot has been cast.

I'm looking forward to seeing which performances my peers will select as the best of the year in the 18th Annual Screen Actors Guild Awards. I've been eligible to vote all 18 years. That's a lot of years of keeping my dues current even when I've not been acting, but I keep it up because I never officially quit acting -- I've just been on a very prolonged maternity leave.

For those who don't know my story, like so many other starry-eyed young girls, I came to Hollywood intending to act. My road to stardom, however, quickly became very bumpy. Literally. Bumpy. Within weeks of arriving, I contracted my first of five consecutive major bumps.

Concealing an ever-growing "Baby Bump" while running to call-backs for roles like one recurring character who was supposed to be a skinny model was one thing, but after the colicky child arrived making it to any audition, rehearsal, or performance became next to impossible. It had all happened too quickly. Without extended family or resources to pay for babysitters, I could not go on auditions, and without going on auditions one can not get cast, and thus, can not act. I'm not complaining. That derailment ended up bringing me back to an earlier love -- writing. That was something I could do at home and I didn't need to hire babysitters nearly as often.

Over the past 18 years, I've come to look at movies from a much more writerly perspective. While I love a great performance, it is usually the story that that I find myself analyzing and celebrating most when it is well done. (And I would argue that actors rarely win "Best Actor" awards alone, but rather in partnership with well-written scripts.) Because of this, I have to really slow myself down when faced with the question of which film to choose for the "Outstanding Performance by a Cast" award. I have to remind myself that this award is not about the story, it's about the acting. This is such a collaborative art that the dissection is not always as easy as it might seem.

Watching all of these great performances does give me the itch to get back into that form of creative expression again, but I may have to wait a bit longer to do that. I'm still overseeing the education of three of my kids, and dedicating a lot of time to writing. I want to be Superwoman and juggle it all at once, but the truth is, I'm not. For now, I'm a writer and mom (or perhaps I should say "mom and writer" -- priorities always affect perspective.) Acting and painting (and traveling the world, not to mention keeping a clean house) will have to remain on hold.

All that said, I view my SAG screeners as an actor, and I view them as a writer. And I celebrate when both sides are pleased. Although, I would say this was far from the best year I have seen for performances paired with stories that blow me away, there were several celebration-worthy nominees. The Help easily won my vote for "Outstanding Performance by a Cast" and is (not surprisingly) also a "Best Picture" Academy Award nominee.

Personally, I found The Artist delightful, and yet I heard one Hollywood outsider say, "Oh brother! Not another film about making films! How self-indulgent can these filmmakers be?" It's a worthy (and fiscally necessary) challenge to strive for objectivity and to try to see films as those who are not in the industry might see them.

Then there are all those films about characters who happen to be writers -- sometimes they work and sometimes they do seem self-indulgent. Is the writer only being lazy and writing about what he or she does in order to avoid research? I do find myself wondering what non-writers think of these movies.

Whether a person is in a "creative profession" or not, however, we all do create -- we create the lives we live and the environments we inhabit; some create fantasy worlds so elaborately detailed that they even deceive themselves; we create relationships and networks of relationships (and sometimes we destroy them); we create harmony and disharmony.... Because creativity is at the core of what all people do in the living of life, I think stories about writers and artists, if done well, can embody that creativity (which is rather abstract) in a metaphor that resonates well beyond the surface of the storyline of a certain character and his profession.

Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris was one of this year's films that did that well. The competition did not allow for me to cast my vote for it to get a SAG award, but I am glad to see that it received some Oscar nominations. It is a good story that I wouldn't mind watching again... and the writer in me absolutely loved this little exchange:

GIL: Would you read it?

ERNEST HEMINGWAY: Your novel?

GIL: Yeah, it's like 400 pages long and I'm just looking 

just for, you know, just an opinion. 

ERNEST HEMINGWAY: My opinion is I hate it. 

GIL: I mean, you haven't even read it. 

ERNEST HEMINGWAY: If it's bad I'll hate it because I hate 

bad writing. If it’s good, I'll be envious and hate it 

all the more. You don't want the opinion of another 

writer. 

(from Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris, 2011)

RETRO BLOG: When Trucks Fly (Human Souls Encased in Metal Obstacles)

Last night when I was driving my daughter home from her dance class, she made a comment about drivers who honk their horns at other cars when they're impatient.  She said that she didn't think people would act that way if they weren't protected by the metal shell of the car.  People feel free to behave rudely, she said, because they don't think about the people in the cars, but rather they just think about the cars as objects.  

My soon-to-be-driving daughter's insight reminded me of a blog from a few years ago (my pre-"Rebekah's Core" days.)  In the interest of gathering more of my ramblings under one cyber "roof," I thought I'd re-print a copy of that vintage blog here...

October 26, 2007 (from MySpace, oh my!)

When Trucks Fly

On my way to the Screenwriting Expo, I saw a truck fall from the sky. 

 

Traffic was moving along at a moderate pace, too congested for anyone to speed. All of a sudden, I saw a truck flying across two or three lanes just about two car lengths ahead of me. Last thing I heard, flying trucks haven't been widely produced. I was reminded of that tornado movie, Twister, and the scene in which cows fly. To me that looked so hokey. If the wind was powerful enough to rip a heifer off the ground, wouldn't it also dislodge enough dirt and other small debris in order to make such a dark cloud that the cow wouldn't even be visible? And where were the pigs? Why weren't any sow soaring through the sky with their barnyard friends? Surely a tornado capable of launching cattle could manage to detour a few little piggies on their way to market. But I digress. 

 

The flying truck has lingered in my mind, weighing heavy on my heart. It was a landscaper's truck, nothing fancy, the kind with wooden sides. I had passed this truck and it had passed me. Traffic was moving slowly enough that I had even noticed the driver. He was a middle-aged Hispanic man, perhaps a poor immigrant who had struggled as a day-laborer to save enough cash to purchase this humble vehicle and start his own business. I don't know why I noticed him in the mass of encased humanity weaving along this vein of Los Angeles infrastructure. Perhaps it was to prepare me for a life lesson.  

 

How many times have I been running late for a meeting and the only obstacles between me and my goal are all these annoying cars? It's a car vs. car battle on the freeways of Los Angeles. Sometimes we forget there are people, human souls, encased in these metal obstacles.  

 

When I saw the flying truck, I slowed down lest it clip the top of my car. It tumbled slow-motion through the sky, shedding parts which I maneuvered around like in one of those driving video games at Chuck E. Cheese. As it rolled and slid to the right side of the freeway, I cautiously split focus between the safety (?) of the road ahead and the surreal tragedy in my rear-view mirror. 

 

Gagging, I fought the impulse to vomit. The truck was motionless. It was a shell, but I had no way of knowing if it contained life any more. One minute I was glancing at a stranger passing me by; the next he may have breathed his last breath. I don't know. 

 

Was he wearing his seat belt? I don't know. If he survived, will he be able to afford the necessary medical bills? He was most likely an independent contractor. Did he carry any kind of disability insurance? How will he be able to feed his children if he's unable to work? If he's not harmed too badly, will he be able to work without his truck? Questions pounded my head and I flipped the radio on to see if there was any news. 

 

The traffic report rattled off slow-downs and inconveniences due to generic collisions. Then they got to the wreck I had just witnessed: "Traffic is slowed due to a roll-over on the right shoulder" was all they said before moving casually on to a tacky mattress ad. That's all? I imagined how serious this event would be to the family of the driver, this trivial inconvenience to commuters.  

 

On the way home, still thinking of the driver of the truck and his family, I yielded the right of way to another car as our two lanes merged into one. Then I realized that there was a man in sport car riding my tail. As soon as he got a break in traffic, he wizzed past me impatiently, laying on his horn as he passed. I had inconvenienced the poor fellow by delaying him a fraction of a second, and he made certain all would know about his anger issues. I pitied him. He didn't know. He'd been lulled into the sad belief that the world revolved around him and all of these moving shells of metal were only meaningless obstacles. I've acted like that too. I've been there, but I don't want to go back. 

 

 

A Picture's Worth 50,000 Words...

I did it.

You are my Context

A Note to my Dear Friends:

I found myself sobbing as I wrote a scene in my novel today.  Literally.  Tears were not just welling up in my eyes -- they were running down my cheeks (stage 2 crying).  Then came the knotting up in my chest and the heaving as I was unable to control, to hold back, the emotion (stage 3).  It was a total body reaction to the emotion of the scene.

When I finished the final word, I had to take a breather.  I knew that if the content is truly compelling and if the emotion ends up translating to my potential future readers, they will need a breather after that, too.  The next scene will be brighter.  So I stepped away from the keyboard to put myself in a different place.

I took time to "visit" some friends.

Some have said that the social media is the enemy of the writer -- that the best way to get your novel or screenplay done is to leave the phone off the hook, disconnect the internet, and cancel cable.  I took more of that approach for last year's NaNoWriMo, and I reached my goal -- the completed first draft of my first novel.  It seems to me that I poured more time into writing that than I have with this one; yet, even though I haven't been shunning social media this time around, I've been making my daily word count goals, and I may actually be benefiting from the time I've taken reading friends' blogs, and even checking out a few movie recommendations. 

Today's scene is a case in point.

I knew from my outline that I needed to write about the mysterious flowers my protagonist received on a dreary, rainy Spring day, and how not knowing who had sent them would affect her.  What I didn't know was that a second scene -- at a flower-filled funeral parlor visitation -- would expound on the need for flowers to be rooted to a significant life source if they are to carry any meaning.  I didn't know my protagonist would meet a freshly widowed woman who would dig deep into her soul with a simple musing about her deceased husband's aversion to store-bought flowers.

I didn't know any of that until after I read a friend's blog in which he shared about how he had tried to use flowers to woo his estranged wife back.  As he grappled with how the flowers he sent failed to melt the hardness of her heart, my characters began to speak to me.  They spoke to me throughout the night, and I woke up with this new scene -- a framework in which two hurting women grapple with the meaning of the flowers that surround them.  I'm not sure that I would have ever gone there if I hadn't taken the time to read my friend's blog.

Likewise, conversations on facebook have inspired me as well.  It's all a matter of keeping balance in life.  I think this year's novel just might end up being richer because I'm allowing myself a little more social interaction.  Last year's story was about a very isolated woman, so writing from a place of isolation may have worked for it, but this year I'm thankful for a broader, richer context to foster my creativity.

Even if our conversations don't touch on the subject of my story or the content of any specific scene I write, we are connected.  I don't live or breathe or create in a vacuum.  The quality of my story reflects the quality and texture of the context from which I write...  and since you, my friends, are my context, the story can't help but reflect beauty.

Permission to Write Badly

I know I said I wasn't going to blog during NaNoWriMo, but I feel invigorated. 

Yesterday, I was nowhere near my target word count for the day as of 10:30 pm.  Everything started out so good, and I was running ahead, and then I hit the end of the well-outlined portion and started delving in to parts of the story that were still extremely sketchy in my mind (the second act doldrums, perhaps?) 

So, along with working on several other writing projects simultaneously -- a short film script that is in the early stages of development, one feature film script that's still in the outlining stages, another that I'm typing and doing some minor revisions as I type (my digital copy was destroyed when the hard drive it was on crashed... literally, it crashed to the ground) -- I'm also trying to build a stronger outline before I do too much rambling on this novel.

I panicked, and I must admit I almost gave up and quit.  "This is ridiculous to attempt with so little preparation," I told myself.

Emboldened by wonderful mentor friends, like Rochelle Melander (who I introduced in my last blog), I was equipped to face off against myself in rebuttal.  "This is an exercise," I reminded myself.  "Press on.  It will be worth it."

Part of my approach to NaNoWriMo is to get the words out no matter what.

My friend Rochelle wrote a blog a few days ago called "Busy is No Excuse: Stop Whining and Write" in which she listed four excellent strategies to help busy people push through the excuses and WRITE!  The third strategy she listed has become a biggie for me over the years:

"Lower your standards." Rochelle wrote. "Many writers quit because the words on paper don’t sound as good as they did in their vision."

Rochelle's words joined in perfect harmony with the words of another writing teacher from years ago who often reminded her students that we had "permission to write badly" -- that if we didn't save our perfectionism for the rewrite, we would likely never get to the rewrite.

Putting it yet another way (while basically saying the same thing)...

When I teach creative writing classes for young students, I often compare the process to sculpting. Sometimes I even bringing clay into the classroom for the kids to play with.  A lot can be learned from looking at writing as a form of sculpture.  Here are a few of the points I make:

• If you edit yourself as you go along, you will end up with a lot of pretty little pieces which you can then try to stick together.  Maybe it will work, but the likelihood of pieces "falling off" is high.  
• You may also find yourself grasping for filler to hold it together, and that filler may not match because it comes from a different batch of verbal clay, developed under different conditions. 
• If, however, you allow yourself to write with abandon (giving yourself permission to write badly), the result will be a solid mass of clay (or stone, or whatever you want to think of that rough draft material as).  
• Sure, there will be a lot of superfluous material.  Some of it might be quite embarrassing -- one might even say "bad."  But that stuff can be cut and chiseled away.
• and the shape of the mass can be bent and molded... 
• and the best part of all is the integrity that the whole of the story will have.  It won't be as piecemeal -- and I believe the likelihood of it holding together will be greatly increased. 

Best of all, if you take this "permission to write badly" and "let's spit out a clump of material that can be edited LATER" approach, you are more likely to achieve your vision.  Rochelle said, "Many writers quit because the words on paper don’t sound as good as they did in their vision."

I've often looked to Michelangelo, who is said to have believed that the images he needed to create resided in the stone -- All he needed to do was chip away that which was not the image and the masterpiece would then be revealed.  If you plan the basic structure of your story -- using outlines, index cards, clusters, storyboards, or whatever works best for you -- then you plunge into writing that rough draft roughly, quickly, and without the editor in you scolding you and trying to be super-precise about what will work and what won't, then I believe that your vision will reside in the material of your rough draft in such a way that only waits for you to step back and take your chisel to release it, to free it.

How can you release that which is not yet been put into words, rough as they might be? that which is still trapped within your mind?  Maybe that's why you sometimes see writers banging their heads against the wall???

The most delightful thing about the artwork of children is the unedited energy behind it.  If we want to retain the ability to infuse our work with energetic vision, we need to develop methods and habits that don't restrict the flow of that energy.  I believe the only way to allow that energy to flow freely is to allow at least a little bit of debris to accompany it.  The debris can be cleared later, but energy forced into the story later is not likely to ring true. That's my theory, anyway.

Back to writing now.  Badly.

Reappearing to inform you of my plan to disappear...

The countdown to NaNoWriMo is almost over. Even though I'm still trying to decide what my story will be, I have committed to write a 50,000 word draft of a new novel during the month of November.

Since writing can be such a solitary endeavor, there is something beautiful about the camaraderie of knowing that there are people all over the world "running" this writing marathon along with me.  If you want to track the progress of my emerging novel, NaNoWriMo has created an handy-dandy chart for that purpose.  (Click on the word "chart")

Maybe you're thinking about joining in the marathon.  If you do, please add me as a "Writing Buddy," so I can track you, too.


Since I'm not likely to be back on here much until the month of November is over, I thought I'd post a few resources that should be helpful in answering any questions you may have about NaNoWriMo specifically or marathon writing in general:

NaNoWriMo website: www.nanowrimo.org/





Also, check out my friend Rochelle's brand new book on the subject: Write-A-Thon

Rochelle is an amazing writer and coach.  She promises to continue blogging at her website during the month of November.









Even though I may not be adding on to this blog much during the month of November, I'd love to come back in December and discover that some of the old entries have been read in my absence.  If you do dig back in the archives and find anything your like, be sure to leave a comment. 


Have a blessed November!

The Road Not Traveled (by the Google Cam vehicle, that is)

When I can't afford the trip to do research, I like "driving around" the neighborhoods I'm writing about on google maps.  However, I don't like it if the road ends just when it's getting interesting... it's like those driving video games that don't let you go off-road, into the field, through caves and caverns, and crash through the walls into an occasional kitchen, funeral parlor, or wedding venue...  



When I came to this roadblock, I couldn't help but wish the google maps driver had defiantly barreled through it, snagging a part of the barricade that would continue to drag and flap in front of the camera for the next 2.5 miles, scooping up the occasional road kill specimen and sending it airborne into the picture, causing viewers to cry out: "UFO's in Cleveland!?! Flying Chupacabra???"

[Virtual] Life (and research) would be so much more interesting if google cam drivers weren't intimidated by warning signs and roadblocks.  I mean, if Sandra Bullock and Keanu Reeves can do this in a clunky old bus...

...can't a google cam driver in a car that maneuvers more easily at least try???  Don't they realize that they are the modern pioneers,  blazing the only trails our cellular devices will allow us to explore?   

Don't tell me none of you ever think the same thing.  Please, don't tell me.