Looking Back

Given this blog has been around for a year now (Happy Birthday blog!), I thought it was time to look back and see if I’d learnt anything.

Looking back over my previous posts I can see that:

• I’m more interested in questions than answers. The posts I find most interesting are the ones that explore inner conflicts, live issues, and conflicting positions, rather than the posts that try to provide the definitive answer to a problem.
• I suffer from perfectionism. Just getting stuff done in a systematic and consistent fashion is helping to balance that out.
• Writing is getting easier for me. It no longer tends to put me in a bad mood. In fact, I’m more conscious of the ways it puts me in a good mood.
• Some of my projects have been put to bed (either permanently or temporarily). I’m now solely working on The Gap, and hope to work on The Kingdoms once that is done. I have no further plans, because I can sense how much time and effort I am going to put into The Gap. At the same time, I believe I will finish The Gap and get it made.
• I drink ginger beer now rather than Coke.

How I Write: In the Flow (2)

Today I've had one of the best days of writing I've ever had. Writing today was easy - a state of 'flow'.

What I particularly liked about today's flow state was it felt like a natural space for me to be in. I woke up this morning and I knew that I wanted to write. And that's what I've done, calmly and methodically for the majority of the day. I'd take breaks and then I'd come back to the writing again - not because I had to, but because I wanted to. I didn't feel driven. I felt right.

I've avoided the idea of writing as a full-time occupation for a number of years now, partly because I felt that I wouldn't be able to get the most out of my days, as I regularly find writing so hard that I couldn't spend most of the day doing it.

If I was able to write like today on an ongoing basis - even an occasional ongoing basis - then that reason no longer stacks up.

Because my flow state today was easy. It was effective. It was lasting. And it feels like it will be back.

Here's hoping.

Why I Write: To Grow Myself

I’ve been realising recently that I really love growing myself, or helping others to grow.

What do I mean by ‘growing myself’? I think it’s about deepening my understanding so I change the way I relate to others, my environment, and even myself.

I love this process of progressively understanding something at a deeper level. For instance, I’m really enjoying working on The Gap, the script I’m writing. As my understanding of the script develops, the way I relate to it changes. I become more and more capable of writing it!

(Plus The Gap is all about people who are growing themselves. So in the process of writing The Gap, I am growing myself by writing about people growing themselves...)

This is also something I find hugely rewarding about my day job. I am encouraged to grow in my job and develop my thinking, and I’m also asked to coach other people to help develop themselves.

I will not be tomorrow who I am today – though mostly it’s hard to tell any difference! I have trouble remembering how I’ve changed. Writing this blog is one way for me to remember who I used to be...

Albion - Don Quixote

Warning: Contains spoilers from a 400 year-old book.

I’ve recently finished reading Don Quixote by Miguel Cervantes. It’s amazing how a novel so old can seem so fresh. I guess that’s why they call it a classic.

Anyway, the purpose of this post is to explore the similarities and differences between Don Quixote and my (as yet unwritten) Albion project.

One of my concerns going into Don Quixote was that I’d find all the ground I wanted to cover in Albion had already been done. Luckily I’ve found these two are not covering the same ground at all. In fact, I think they’re from opposite sides of the planet.

Similarities

Both stories are comedies about mad characters who embrace a chivalric identity – Don Quixote de la Mancha in Don Quixote and King Arthur in Albion. Both characters are so strong in their convictions that they are able to draw others into their madness: Don Quixote has his faithful squire, Sancho Panza; King Arthur has an entire town (and even a country in one iteration).

Differences

Don Quixote is a sustained work of satire. The intention is always to lampoon notions of chivalry by exploding them against the real world. Don Quixote holds up our romantic notions and asks: do these hold up when you test them against the way the world really is? Or are we just making fools of ourselves?

By the end of the novel, the romantic ideal of the pastoral life (a common theme at the time Cervantes was writing) is skewered in precisely the same way as the romantic ideal of chivalry. In Don Quixote, illusions mislead us into folly. Those follies are amusing for the reader, but are a warning against taking our illusions literally. Don Quixote is a comic novel with deeply serious intent.

Albion is more forgiving of illusion – in fact, foolishness is more likely to arise from being unwilling to embrace illusion. Albion is dealing with a world in need of romanticism. The spreading madness of the King goes to the heart of that – chivalry in Albion is an idea whose time has come. Romanticism may not be enough, but it’s a needed step.

And Albion isn't a satire. A comedy, but not a satire.

So ultimately I feel Don Quixote and Albion are quite opposite in intent and approach. Which makes me feel better - I’m glad I’m not in competition with Cervantes!

What are my goals as a writer?

I came up with this question for discussion at our most recent NZWG Wellington Writer’s Group. Having set it, I then had to try and answer it!

I came up with these answers:

In one year

I want to have finished a first and second draft of The Gap (the script I’m working on), and started to assemble a project team that can actually get it made.

In five years

I want to have a slate of projects with some level of funding attached, so I can reduce the level of non-writing work I have to do.

In ten years

I want to be able to make a good living out of writing things that I want to write!

Now that I’ve defined my goals, I want to think further about how to achieve those goals, and what the obstacles are.

How about you? What are your goals? And do you find goal-setting useful?

Watchmen, The Room, and the Shared Experience

I’ve had the pleasure of seeing two films recently that I enjoyed very much, for wildly different reasons. What I want to focus on in this post is the audience response to these films: in one case, unusually divergent, in the other case, eerily similar.

Watchmen has led to a lot of debate amongst people I know and fellow bloggers. Opinion is definitely polarised – and in my opinion, more so than most films. People are responding to the same film in very different ways. I liked the sex scene set to 'Hallelujah' – for others, it’s the height of ludicrousness.

Which brings me to the other extreme.

On Monday, I had the pleasure of seeing The Room for the first time. If you enjoy 'bad movies', you have to see this film. Put simply, it’s the greatest 'bad movie' I have ever seen. The Room is so funny and particular that watching it was a sublime experience, and one I'm looking forward to repeating.

And something I found particularly fascinating was that The Room manages to create a very similar shared experience across viewers.

The four of us who saw it found it hilarious. We laughed at the same points – we made a number of ‘original’ wisecracks. Following up on the film the next day, we realised that most of our off-the-cuff observations were echoed across the Internet – sometimes down to nearly exactly the same line. What we found funny about the film was precisely the same stuff that the legion of Internet/LA fans find funny.

As a result of this, The Room has actually built up a ritualistic set of audience responses in the same way as the Rocky Horror Picture Show. Self-styled super-fans enjoy the shared experience of shouting lines (and spoons!) at the screen. It sounds like they get pretty much the same experience time and time again.

It got me thinking about authorial intention in cinema.

Is The Room a success for delivering such a consistent response, and Watchmen a failure because the audience responds so differently?

Is the aim of screenwriting to get the audience to feel a certain way about your work? And do you fail as a screenwriter if the audience doesn't respond as you expected?

Why I Write: For the Money (2)

It’s hard to argue with the idea that screenwriters should be properly recompensed for their hard work, and that they should insist on decent writing rates and conditions.

But equally it’s hard to argue with the screenwriter that is willing to work for free in order to ‘break into the industry’ or simply get their vision up on screen.

I can see the virtue in both sides of this argument. So this is a debate where polarity management comes in useful; polarity management being the idea that apparently opposite sides of an argument can each have a good case to make, and the aim is to acknowledge and manage the debate rather than claim one side as the winner.

Helen and I were talking about this yesterday, and we came up with a principle that I feel incorporates the two sides of the argument for me. It’s this:

If someone is going to make a profit out of your work, then you as the screenwriter should be making a profit as well.

As screenwriters we don’t want to get ripped off. So it’s up to us to protect the investment that we’ve put into our work. And therefore to insist on decent writing rates and conditions.

But the ‘if’ in the principle above is a big one. A lot of films aren’t really making money, so where is this profit we’re meant to be earning as a screenwriter going to come from? So even though we should protect ourselves, we should be realistic about the expected return.

And sometimes that return won't be money - there are different kinds of 'profit'. As a screenwriter, you want to make sure that your input into the finished film is properly recognised, and therefore you're rewarded in that way.

Something that further confuses the situation in the film industry is that it can often be hard to tell who’s making money and who isn’t. For those of you who haven’t seen it, Hix has linked to a very good post about Monkey Points. The key idea: make sure you sure you’re in line for a percentage of the gross profit rather than net profit. You’ll probably never see another cent if you wait for the net profit to come through.

Oh, and here’s a link to my earlier post on writing for the money as well.