little bits

The accumulation of little bits, particularly with regard to Van Gogh, generates something other than the sum of its parts. With regard to the paintbrush, a mass made of just bristle and bristle and bristle (for instance).

It's not the sudden ambitions you take on that will have significance. It's the small things over time. Small habits, small considerations, small things made, and even small listenings. It's taken years of watching and listening to others for me to confidently price my time and my worth. It took decades of scrawling and erasing to generate a novel, and not just a novel, but an ease in writing new things. 

The key is not just to develop new things, it's also to develop abilities. This is, in fact, where I have a challenge: when a sustained effort over time does not develop ability AND new content, I get discouraged. The modern sensibility would have us believe that learning to do anything (like how to apply for college or how to do your laundry) is useful, and has universal, applicable lessons, but you have to dig to get them. A lot of lessons are disposable. You learn them quick, they serve their purpose and then there's no point in studying the matter further. Submissions, for instance, discourage me in this way. You learn to do them and then you just keep sending. You can only learn how to take rejection once. Once the lesson is learned, nothing new is gained except more chances and finding a good fit for your work. No skills are sharpened, few new challenges arrive. You just keep sending. 

So if you find something that is sustainable, that is small bits over time, that can help you make things AND develop your skills, keep doing it!

On Passion

I still get excited about the sheer awoken-ness of characters sometimes. About the mystery of them. While editing scene 2 of Delta Phi I got to see the strength of a cinematographers instinct in a new environment, and the oscillation of disguise/reveal of Delta as he moves through a library. I knew it would be there in theory, it’s written into the script. But seeing something concretely is a huge part of the magic for me. It causes something in me to wake up, to stir a little, to just feel wonder and bewilderment. It’s like the discovery of a strange and exotic new animal. I’m absolutely in love.

This website is, in part, academic. It has to be if I want to share the meaning of metafiction, but I have to write to the beat of my passion. Passion feels like acting on impulse but with extreme slowness. It’s this deep compassion for every aspect of your unique, individual experience, to the point that your experience expands and it’s so much about what’s in you that it’s not about you at all anymore. Passion is so easily misunderstood. It so often controls us instead of the other way around.

I’m pondering this because I need to tap into it over the next several weeks. I need to be unequivocally committed to this work right now, to embrace an entirely different lifestyle if I’m to meet my deadlines, and more importantly, my potential. I didn’t necessarily want that for this season of my life. I wanted something more nurturing, romantic and restful. But we don’t always get to choose what season we are in, and fighting it detracts from your experience. Anyway, it’s a great place to be, to be working like this. I only hope that I can have many, many more seasons like this because there’s so much work I want to share, not to mention generate.
I never could explain the immense love I have for the imagined friends of our hearts, and with film, I may not have to. I’m in a place where my love makes sense. I have to fight to keep a place for it because it’s how I have to share my light. We all have something great to offer, but we have to find the place where it’s wanted and work tirelessly to keep that place.

Top 5 Resources for Writing to Character

Characters & Viewpoint (Elements of Fiction Writing)

$12.37

By Orson Scott Card

This book is one of the most frequently cited texts in workshops and writing panels. The MICE quotient, Cinematic Third Person and many other methods writers use today were first introduced by Card in this book. While I personally don’t ascribe to all the methods, I love recommending it because it’s succinct and shares a lot of principles that are useful for scriptwriters.

Kicking In the Wall: A Year of Writing Exercises, Prompts, and Quotes to Help You Break Through Your Blocks and Reach Your Writing Goals

$12.57

By Barbara Abercrombie

Books of writing prompts are usually not good for much else other than warms ups and pure technical training. This one is special. The exercises are well thought out, and can be applied to your character’s experiences or your own. Either way, I find that they draw out fresh conflicts and details. They compel my characters to move.

Alone With All That Could Happen: Rethinking Conventional Wisdom about the Craft of Fiction

By David Jauss

This book has the most eloquent explanations of conflict and point of view that I’ve come across. It’s directed more towards novelists than screenwriters, though. A good alternative for this if you are just just focused on screenwriting is Judith Weston’s The Film Director’s Intuition, which has a part on rehearsal techniques that can also provide a nuanced understanding of character perspective.

45 Master Characters: Mythic Models for Creating Original Characters, Revised Edition

$10.93

By Victoria Lynn Schmidt

For the most part, this book is exactly what it sounds like. It categorizes and describes character archetypes. Good for both writers and academics, but the real meat is in the back. She breaks down methods of change for characters (character arcs) and presents dichotomous solutions to well known character structures. (For example, the feminized version of the hero’s journey that we witness in The Wizard of Oz)

The Undiscovered Self: The Dilemma of the Individual in Modern Society

$7.43

By Carl G. Jung

Anything by Carl Jung is valuable, really. 

This guy breaks down symbols and the way that pervasive narratives represent and shape our inner conflicts as human beings. If you want to write human characters, this will fascinate you. Start with his theory of the anima/animus; it will give you a deeper understanding of what characters are to us and to each other.

I hope that those resources prove useful for you. If you’re looking for good examples of stories that characterize people sublimely and are easy to learn from, check out Inu-Yasha, Breaking Bad, the novels of Brandon Sanderson and anything by Jane Yolen. It’s also useful to examine multiple retellings of a classic story and witness how the characterization has changed across versions, as well as the traits that are preserved.