Aaron Sorkin and Inspiration

My wife and I have a show called The Newsroom. Like most couples with busy lives we have to make time to actually do something together. This action not in any way unique to us is the streaming of a show for an hour or so on Sunday nights.

              The Newsroom has been our favourite for a bit. It’s the creation of the brilliant screenwriter Aaron Sorkin. It’s about a bunch of reporters and producers who work in a, well, newsroom. It’s intelligent, crisp, current, and features Sorkin’s trademark machine gun dialogue and so good that it’s an international tragedy it only lasted three seasons.

              Phenomenal acting, great cinematography, wonderful score (that opening!), but what sets the show apart as my favourite is Sorkin’s writing. Forget everything else that goes into the making of a big-budget HBO show, the writing is where this thing stops and ends. From concept to plot to delivery it’s razor sharp. Even if you don’t know the show you’ve probably seen Jeff Daniels’s rant from the first season about why America is not the best country in the world.

              It’s so good that when we finish an episode I’m absolutely buzzing. The overdrive I feel after that show is better than a half dozen cups of dark roast coffee. I have to go write something right away. This is what great art does, it inspires, but sometimes you encounter something so good that it out and out demands. Usually I binge in these moments, the words pouring out of me faster than I can account for them.

              Because Sorkin’s greatest craft (though not his only one) is creating dialogue, before I even sit down the rapid-fire back and forth of his characters is still echoing in my head. I don’t set down to write like Sorkin, but I have his influence on what I write. It’s key to understand the difference, though, because so many young writers that I work with end up copying the style of the thing that inspires them. Not the same thing.
            Given that it functions in a political newsroom it’s hard to deliver anything in black and white. But somehow the show’s main theme is that these people are trying to do good, they’re trying to be moral. That good is so simple that anyone who encounters it in the show is immediately suspicious. It’s a running joke. I find moral art appealing so this further adds to the shows inspiration for me.
            Inspiration, not imitation. It's important to have something that inspires you. In Julia Cameron's book/course The Artist's Way she encourages "artist's dates" where you encounter art that gets your own creativity flowing, inspires you to go and do what it is you do. But sometimes we encounter something so potent, so engaging, that it's as if booster cables have been stretched across the gap of blockage and charged us to the point of buzzing.

Here's a little clip of a writing class Sorkin's promoting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ujdVdQkw24M

On Stephen King

As a joke (not joke) when talking about great writers, specifically perhaps great American writers but a Canadian audience often forgets to specify, I often tell my students that Stephen King’s problem is he needs to die.

              Morbid humour, sure, but I’ve got a feeling Mr. King would probably get it.

              There are two writers I consider the greatest living American masters of words: Cormac McCarthy and Stephen King. McCarthy writes prose that sing of the page, complicated, mad, rife with perfect and yet utterly unique similes. His characters are impossibly, inhumanly over-human, but I find myself lamenting his talent because it’s being used consistently to express a world view that is nihilistic, fatalistic, and anti-human. If his writing is his heart—and I’ve seen enough consistency across his work to believe it is—then he thinks the very worst of our race.

              He presents humanity in a very awful light, casting the gleam on the tube we’re flushing ourselves down. It’s cynical, it’s beautiful, it’s rare. He is unarguably a genius.

              “Stephen King writes horror.” Agreed, but I’d say Stephen King writes horror well. He also writes humans well, love well, fantasy well, shock well. He creates human characters that are somehow based on the people you know. He does this consistently.

               And yet, he is not given his due. He’s too popular, too prolific, too readable.

              In the seventh book of his stunning Dark Tower series (his opus, well, his latest opus, after The Stand, after It, and before whatever his next opus will be unless he does the sensible thing and dies) he writes himself in and a character has heard of him says she’s only read a few of his books because she doesn’t like him. The Gunslinger asks her why she didn’t stop at just one of his books.

              Truth: find me a person who has read only one Stephen King book.

              The man is one of the greatest writers in American history, a genius of the craft, a wonder of style. He’s what we all aspire to be. But because he sells millions and because he usually errs on the side of page-turning creepiness, he sometimes falls below Mr. McCarthy. Because his heroes often win, because he believes in all of his darkness that good usually wins, he’s somehow the lesser.

              Stephen King is a gift. An author prolific, diverse, whose fine-wined personality pours out onto the page, into his speaking engagements, onto his website. Only death will grant him the respect he has long deserved. I think he’d dig the irony.

Coincidence and Meaning

     Recently I travelled to a conference in Lake Louise Alberta, one of my single favourite locations in the Rockies. Really in all of Canada. Yes, it's an overpriced tourist-haven, but looking past that you can see why. It's magnificent. I've always done good writing while I'm there, and this trip was as fruitful as the last. Cost aside, it may be my single favourite place to write and walk. I was extremely exited for it, barely sleeping the night before leaving like a kid waiting for Christmas.
     I stopped in Banff for something to eat and to do a little journalling at a lounge called the Maple Leaf. Get the juices flowing so when the conference ended I could dive right in to my work that evening. Well, at the Maple Leaf Lounge I pulled out Natalie Goldberg's Writing Down the Bones to read a little essay to inspire me. I'd forgotten that the bookmark I was using was from a now-defunct book store. In Banff. The selection Goldberg wrote featured a group of poems from writers with mental challenges and one of the poems was called "Maple Leaf."
     It could have been nothing. Or, I could have just stopped in Banff to read a book that just happened to have a Banff bookmark in it at a lounge that just happened to be called the Maple Leaf reading a poem that just happened to be called "Maple Leaf." It can all mean nothing or it can all mean something.
     My first novel is about coincidence, about how so many things can circle together impossibly to the point where we have to address it, we have to accept it. The faithful see the thumbprint of God, the superstitious see their ancestors or the universe or ghosts working for them, the creative see possibility.
     Yes, there may be no meaning at all to coincidence, but we as writers have two jobs: to expose meaning but also to impose it. This second may sound forceful and it may sound like just the thing that frustrates students of literature: that we can see things that aren't there or might not be there or might not be obvious and say it means something.
     But I attest that as artists, that's our job. It all means something. Our job is to sift through what those meanings can be and say and do, what truths we can dig up in them to say what needs to be said about what it is to be human.
     And then we must shout it from the mountain tops.

On Passion

     Passion is a truly misaligned word. Maybe understandably so. I mean, it's possible to be passionate in a good way (when playing a piano, when acting in a stage drama, when confessing your love to someone), but there're also bad times to be passionate (when assessing a crisis, when speaking on the phone to your bank, when trying to get bumped up to first class), and so I suppose it makes sense that you either love or hate passion. It's really not something to feel meh about, is it now?
     Recently, a friend sent me a link to a blog he kept while courting his future wife, their marriage, the difficult process of trying to get pregnant, pregnancy, and then becoming a dad. He sent me a link for several reasons. Dads love reading about dads, we're old friends, and the whole thing was tied in coincidence linking the birth of one of my kids to his meeting his future wife. (I love that sort of thing. Remind me I need a blog on "On Coincidence.")
     When he sent me the link, he reminded me to go easy on him because he's "not a writer." Well, not to get too semantic on it, but isn't he? He wrote something, does this not make him a writer. True, he may not have had the flourish and the flare of someone who crafts prose for a living, but he had the sharp, meaningful language of the convicted.
     It had a passion, and it was beautiful. It was written, as they say, from the heart and I found it wrenching and tugging and felt. It was wonderful.
     Writing well matters, but writing something potent like that matters that much more.

   

500 Unsolicited MSs?!

Found this interesting. Can't imagine what sort of a writing world we would live in if we had more people capable of delivering feedback this often.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/books-and-media/kate-taylor-when-amateur-writers-had-professional-reality-checks/article26144621/

Inspiration

         It's interesting for me to talk with other writers or students of writing about what they do when struggling with the thing that for the sake of argument we'll call Writer's Block. The symptoms are various. It can be a complete inability to put pen to paper, finger to keyboard. It can be frustration with the way the material is coming out, even though it may be coming out in reams. Or it can be a writer who has successfully completed a work having trouble moving on to the next thing.
        The advice I have received and give is when you're feeling like you can't write, that's when you need to write the most. Getting past the difficult, unproductive times increases the frequency of the rich times, and by getting through those low patches you show that you won't quit no matter the circumstances. After all, writers write.
         One thing I always encourage my students--or any blocked writers--to try are the many, many activity books out there. There's an entire market for books about writing by writers (or other artists) in the vain of Julia Cameron's The Artist's Way. For myself, some of my best idea have come from tasks in these texts. They're fun, they're simple, and they keep you going. Often, just having someone put a task in front of you to write about, a "What if" or a "Can you" is all the jumping off point you need.

On Voice

     One of my favourite stories about an author finding his voice is Hunter S. Thompson. Now, take his sordid addictions, suicide, and altogether racy persona out of the equation (if one actually can), Thompson could write. Certainly one of my idols. I've heard many times how he used to take F. Scott Fitzgerald's work and write it out on a typewriter word for word, just to feel the rhythm, the cadence of that old great's work. Spend any time with Gatsby and you can see why: every sentence of that thing is honed to perfection. Despite being a pretty sparse text, it's deservedly revered as a work of genius. And it's interesting to note that Thompson was writing amid a time and life of vice and emulating someone who did the same.
     In the film Finding Forrester--a staple in my writing classes--William provides a writers-blocked Jamal with a sample of his own work. He advises Jamal to write the words until he finds his own. This proves the antidote to the disease.
     It's a delicate thing, finding the voice. More than once I've seen a great young writer stumble across, say, The Catcher in the Rye and nearly everything they produce for a while after sounds like it's being narrated by Holden Caulfield. It's much worse case with kids mired in the bleak cliches of graphic novels or the putrid prose of Suzanne Collins.
     The balance is in inspiration rather than imitation. The biggest influence of the voice of my fiction is Yann Martel. I don't try to write like him. I don't try to make the tragic slightly humorous in an observant way, and I don't pepper it with study of every realm of the existential. But what that man may be the best of his generation at is the twist in a sentence. He writes the most quotable work since, well, since Hunter S. Thompson. Language rich in observation, in parallel structure, in taking the familiar--the potential cliche--in wording and turning it back on itself. So many of his lines stand free on their own merits, not only when contributing to an overall narrative.
     My voice doesn't resemble his. It's like how you retain your Canadian accent while travelling abroad: you hear the lilting of the local tongue in your head, but what comes out of you is still all your own.