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.

Nobel Prize Ignoring Literature: Globe and Mail Article

Found this fascinating. Yes, it's from a very American perspective, but the discussion of college and MFA courses depriving a readership of true literature is an interesting one, as is the discussion on European prizes and American readers.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/books-and-media/the-nobel-prize-as-a-snub-of-creative-writing/article21150354/

2014 Can. Lit. Nominees

I'm always interested in what books get nominated for our awards, and it does appear that we've hit a sort of Renaissance for Canadian Lit. The titles alone (Oil Man and the Sea, for real!) are awesome.

Governor General: http://www.cbc.ca/books/2014/10/governor-generals-literary-awards-2014-the-finalists.html

Giller: http://www.cbc.ca/books/2014/10/scotiabank-giller-prize-2014-the-shortlist.html

Past The Block

I don't believe in Writer's Block per se. Never have. I do understand that there are times we are less inclined to write, sure, and I believe that there are times when the writing is not as good as it could be, should be. But I believe that a writer writes, and even if it's a steaming pile of crap we--figuratively--reach into that steaming pile and retrieve something worthwhile. Even the most unproductive of ventures can produce something as long as you're writing.

I've been having a bugger of a time writing well for the past sixty-two days. I'm a teacher and summer is often my most productive time, and yet this summer was one of the worst for new and good production. I was half way through working on edits to a book I've been done for a months but hasn't clearly come out of the editing stage. It's my finest work so far, with two distinct narrators whose stories meet in the end. I'm very proud of it, and of them. One of them is named David and there's no denying he's a barely-veiled version of myself. David's narration is first person, in fact written in journals while he travels across Europe on a quest to decide whether his life is any longer worth living.

I loved writing David. I loved it because it was so easy. His voice was so similar to my own voice that I really just had to fictionalize events and react to them as I knew I would react to them. He borrowed my voice, or so I thought. In reality he stole it, and I have solved the issue with my blockage.

I'm struggling with this last edit. Life has got in the way, yes. And I find that every time I sit down at my journal to write in my voice, or at my computer, the voice I hear in my head is mine, but the fictional me I have poured into this character. I can't write in my voice because I haven't put David to bed.

As I said, I love that character. If I am able to publish his tale, he and I have a bit of time coming with even greater intimacy than when I was writing him. And, frankly, he and his voice will be attached to me for the rest of my writing career and probably my life, as they appear to be one. I'm fine with that. Now. Once I became fine with that I understood that to take my voice back from David, I needed to finalize his story, to put that book to bed.

It came as a great relief. I mean, the stress of having to finish and hopefully publish that book remains, but now I know what's been in the way. It was a singular experience. I have never heard of any writer who felt they couldn't write because their own creation had robbed them of their voice. But knowing, I know what to do to be past it.

Writing Prompts

I don't get Tumblr, but I do get writing. These are awesome.

http://writingprompts.tumblr.com/

Of Dragonflies and Community Support

Audrey Gene busy signing. 

   My friend and fellow writer Audrey Gene celebrated the publication of her novel Of the Dragonfly today. I was pleased to see this, knowing what a big day this was for her. Two years ago I did an edit of this book and am aware that it's been a long wait. It was a celebration, and deserved note.
     But that's not why I'm writing this. I'm writing this because I made a point to sneak out on my kids' play rehearsal to get there, but really, she didn't need my support. There was a line up for the entire two hours I was there, and besides friends and family, I saw two other local authors, our mayor, and folks from the city. This was an event.
     It was great to see this overwhelming support for art, for a writer celebrating and unveiling the results of her craft, something she's sweat over for years. It was good to see a little town telling one of its own that she'd done well.

Writing prompts from Donald M. Murray's Write to Learn--Chapter 12

Chapter 12     In the Writer's Workshop

9. Compare and contrast a first draft of a paper you wrote with a final draft. Make a copy of your first draft on your computer or word processor and triple space between lines. In the margins and spaces, note where you made significant changes to the draft as you revised it. Retrace the steps you took to get from the first to the last draft. How and why did you make the changes you did? What effect did those changes have on the final draft? What did you learn about the writing process while revising the original draft?

10. Find an interview with a writer. . . . Write a case study about the writer, focusing on the writer's particular composing process and how he or she goes about revising. Then compare the process with your own.

15. Choose someone you know who absolutely hates to write, and study his or her process of composing a single essay for a class. Ask the writer to describe the difficulties he or she has with writing. What obstacles did the writer encounter? Did he or she overcome them? If so, how? If not, why? Using the writer's drafts and interviews, compose a case history.

16. Choose someone who is in love with writing, and repeat Activity 15. Then write a case history comparing the avid writer with the frustrated writer. See if you can pinpoint specific features of both writers' processes that made writing particular pieces good or bad experiences for them.

Murray, Donald. M. Write to Learn. Orlando: Harcourt Brace College, 1998.

Writing prompts from Donald M. Murray's Write to Learn--Chapter 11

Chapter 11     Read Writers' Writing

2. Select a short piece of writing (less than two pages) of a published work and read it aloud, making believe you are the author appearing at a reading in a bookstore or library. Tell the readers how you came to write the selection. What problems did you discover in writing it? How did you solve them? What other solutions did you consider? How would you write it differently today? Answer these and other questions about the selection as you believe the writer would answer.

4. [C]hoose three to five books of the same genre. . . . Sit down in a comfortable chair, and compare the opening paragraphs of each book to those of the others. What were the different approaches used by the authors? How different were the voices between the authors? For whom were the authors writing? Are the audiences different? How can you tell? What techniques do the authors use to draw the reader in? Did they succeed? Write your answers in your daybook or reading journal.

15. Preserve a special section in your daybook or reading journal for memorable, provocative, or disturbing passages from your readings. Share with the class, and talk about why you selected them. Did they make you think? Have you had experiences that gave them special meaning? Did you find them beautiful, ugly, upsetting? What struck you as particularly significant about these passages?


Murray, Donald. M. Write to Learn. Orlando: Harcourt Brace College, 1998.

Writing prompts from Donald M. Murray's Write to Learn--Chapter 10

Chapter 10     Fit Your Process to Your Task

5. Compare and contrast two pieces of writing in different forms--a researched essay with a persuasive essay, for example; or a reflective essay with an analytical essay. Draw a line down a page in your daybook and outline the main features of the first essay on the left, the second on the right. Discuss your findings in class.

7. Think of a career you might like to enter . . .  and brainstorm a list of forms of writing you think you would do in that field. Then arrange an interview with employees in the field, and ask them to describe in detail their writing tasks. Ask to see copies, and note down the main features of particular genres.

14. Join a group of classmates to study three or four genres of television shows (a sit-com, a drama, a detective or cops show, a documentary, a mystery, a made-for-TV suspense film, a magazine or news program, etc.). Assign one kind of show to each person. Take notes as you watch. Think of the writer's role and what features of the genre he or she must emphasize. What kinds of elements characterize certain kinds of shows? Get together as a group and write up an analysis comparing and contrasting the different features of particular television genres.

23. Take a task that you are familiar with on the job, in a sport, or in another course, and list the steps in the process you use to complete the task. Compare that with how you write to see if there are ways you can apply those familiar, successful methods to the writing task.

Murray, Donald. M. Write to Learn. Orlando: Harcourt Brace College, 1998.

Writing prompts from Donald M. Murray's Write to Learn--Chapter 9

Chapter 9      Edit to Clarify Meaning

2. Collect troublesome sentences from your own work. As your writing partner, group, or teacher helps you recognize wordy, unclear, or grammatically weak sentences, add them to your list. Select one or two sentences from the list daily, and work with a partner to rewrite them.

3. Take a piece of writing, your own or someone else's, and cut it in half. Replace multiple words with one when one will do. Make war on needless adjectives. Cut back on prepositional phrases. Pare to the bone.

16. Have a partner read through a couple pages of your draft and then write one sentence in the left margin next to each paragraph briefly summing up what the paragraph is saying. If your partner has trouble summarizing a paragraph or misreads your meaning, rewrite the troublesome passage, working to clarify each sentence.

18. Read your paper backward, sentence by sentence, starting with the very last one. This technique allows you to pick out mistakes you might normally gloss over when reading logically from beginning to end, front to back.


Murray, Donald. M. Write to Learn. Orlando: Harcourt Brace College, 1998.

Writing prompts from Donald M. Murray's Write to Learn--Chapter 8

Chapter 8     Revise to Explore Meaning

3. Give copies of the second half of your draft to your class. Ask them to write a couple of paragraphs each describing what they imagine the first part of the draft to be like. Then pass out copies of the entire draft and discuss ways that their readings of the draft's conclusion may help you revise the first part.

6. List at the top of a draft at least three of the seven writers' senses--seeing, hearing, touching, tasting, smelling, imagining, and remembering. Then go back through your paper and expand the areas that bring these senses into play, incorporating into your draft the details that pertain to each sense. As your paper expands, you may want to go back and pare down other sections where you summarize or tell instead of describe and show.

7. Select one sentence or paragraph that your draft could not be without. Use that sentence or paragraph as your introduction and see where it takes you.

12. Read your paper aloud in a small group, and have your classmates note where you pause, stumble, or otherwise revise your wording as you read. Reading aloud like this lets the draft speak and teases out areas of your paper that want more attention. Go back to these spots and figure out what you intended to say but never said, what you should have omitted but kept, what the draft itself wants you to hear.

23. Collect simplistic endings from television sitcoms and dramas. See how many endings you can find that resolve all the characters' issues and problems within thirty or sixty minutes. Then rewrite the endings to make them more complicated.

Murray, Donald. M. Write to Learn. Orlando: Harcourt Brace College, 1998.

Writing prompts from Donald M. Murray's Write to Learn--Chapter 7

Chapter 7     Draft

2. Get a draft down, then write another draft without looking at the original. Include only what you remember or want to remember. Allow the draft to lead you into new areas. Do this again. Then go back to your drafts and select the one you like best, or revise by combining the best elements of each.

9. Start in medias res, which is Latin for "in the middle of things." Don't get hung up on finding a perfect lead, but jump in anywhere. Write a piece of description, a chunk of dialogue, or even the conclusion to your story. Develop an idea for the middle of the piece, or select one image or concept you know you can write about comfortably and start with that.

15. Pretend you're writing in your diary rather than composing a story or assigned essay. Don't try to be deep or complicated. Just get your draft going. Use plenty of time references and words that imply sequence, just as you might in a diary: "That morning . . . " "Later . . . " "After a while . . ." "Then . . ." let these time words propel you forward; you can always remove them later.

22. Take a significant piece of information from the writing you're working on and list all of the ways it can be documented: quotations, statistics, descriptions, anecdotes, and so on. Then develop it, using some or all of these elements.

Murray, Donald. M. Write to Learn. Orlando: Harcourt Brace College, 1998.

Writing prompts from Donald M. Murray's Write to Learn--Chapter 6

Chapter 6      Plan

5. Brainstorm catchy subtitles and order them according to how you want to present information in your paper. When you have finished writing your draft, keep your subtitles or remove them and insert sentences that connect the different stories of your essay.

8. Do a brainstorming map. Discuss with a writing partner the most interesting clusters that emerge on your map and circle them. Then think of a sentence that states the central topic or focus of each cluster. Under each sentence list as many related details as you can think of. Then arrange the sentences according to the order you want them to appear in your paper.

20. Write an unruly draft and go through it paragraph by paragraph, jotting a sentence or two in the margins of the paper and summing up what each paragraph says. Read through your marginalia and see what points are repeated and rephrased in the paper. Use these as your major points for planning your paper.

21. have an outlining fest. Choose and essay or story to read together as a class, and then have each class member draw up an outline for it, being as creative as he or she wishes. You may decide to use the outlining ideas in this chapter. Gather all the outlines into a class binder for ideas on planning future essays.

Murray, Donald. M. Write to Learn. Orlando: Harcourt Brace College, 1998.

Writing prompts from Donald M. Murray's Write to Learn--Chapter 5

Chapter 5     Explore

3. Think of a famous or historical local figure you want to find out more about. Begin at the library with biographies about the person, and look in the online database or card catalogue for general information on your subject. Ask reference librarians what related materials are available. Then contact your local historical society and ask them where the personal papers and diaries of the person you have chosen are located and whether you  can gain access to them. Such papers, called primary sources, are often housed in university or local town libraries or special museum houses. Sometimes you need official permission to read them, but most institutions will cooperate with you if you are doing research.

6. With a group of classmates, take a sensory tour of a site--a favourite spot in the mountains, a beach, a town, a neighbourhood, or perhaps a place of historical significance. Ask each person in the group to be responsible for one sense--seeing, hearing, tasting, smelling, or touching--and to record as many sensory details as possible. Reconvene as a group, and write up a portrait of the site.

11. Walk through a cemetery and observe and record as many details as possible: names and dates, sizes and conditions of headstones, genders of the deceased, relationships, years lived, the vaults, status, and tombstones, the cemetery landscape itself. Write a history of the cemetery just from what you observe. Do you think some "residents" were richer than others? Later, go to the church or public office that keeps the cemetery's records and read them for more information. Visit your local library, and check out newspaper stories and other printed sources about the cemetery and the deceased. Then revise your history according to the new details you gather.

14. Take your daybook to a public space, such as a restaurant or cafe. Write down as accurately as possible the conversations of people who pass by or converse at tables in your vicinity. Pay attention to the sound and rhythm of speech, and record as many comments and dialogues as you can. Don't worry about following any one conversation through from beginning to end. Just try to catch the gist of what people are saying.

Murray, Donald. M. Write to Learn. Orlando: Harcourt Brace College, 1998.