A Writer's Time: Making The Time To Write - Dr. Ken Atchity [FULL INTERVIEW]

Film Courage: Ken, I have a quote here from the late author Philip Roth and quote is the road to hell is paved with works in progress. Dr. Ken Atchity, Author/Producer: Yes, that's worse than good intentions. What's that a question like it's a statement and a question I guess in that do you have any ideas on that I know it's it's kind of a thing I'm just throwing out here but well I think unfinished works are that the kind of characteristic debris of the writers life of any visionaries life I mean that the discards that Leonardo da Vinci had in his studio were prodigious and you you just have a lot of ideas and you can't do them all and one of the methods that I've developed over the years is to actually set aside a new idea and give it a two-week rest and and check in with it in two weeks to see whether you even remember the idea and and the key to doing that as a writer is not to write it down see it's like a basic rule that I have is that if you have an idea and as a writer your immediate goal is to write it down get it down because that's what writers do if you can train your brain not to do that you're gonna have much better product in the long run because you're not writing every single thing down including every bad thing so by not writing it down when you revisit it two weeks from now if you don't remember it that's great that means one lousy idea went away as opposed to trying to do something with every single idea that you have and so I think that's part of what creative people learn is how to manage their own minds and because I was an accountant son I long-ago analyze the creative process the creative mind and decided that they weren't just crazy the way a lot of people think they actually is a method to creativity and in fact it spreads across every discipline whether you're a physicist or a mathematician or you know an inventor or a writer or an artist creative process has the same steps in the same general pattern so if you can understand the process then you aren't nearly as neurotic as you are if you don't understand it you know one of my goals was to not be crazy Salvador Salvador Dali said one of my favorite things about this he said the difference between myself and a madman is that I am not mad and I love that because it's it's exactly what I'm talking about it's it's understanding the method in your madness as Shakespeare put it and if you can understand that then you don't have to be unhappy and neurotic in order to be a productive writer speaking of which writing things down do you make lists I do make lists but kind of limited I mean what I what I have instead is a very complicated method of time management that involves a chart that I make regularly and the chart has room for some lists but most of what I do is doing the same things in compartments of time that I believe are the right compartments for what I do I know in our last interview which was about a year a year and a half ago we talked about one of your books and you talked about time management and that you know creative people that get things done they're very aware of time so then I started to monitor myself am I really as aware of time as I should be do it maybe I'm not a where I where enough and so it became this new thing where you were talking about before that just that most people that are very productive they know exactly how much time something takes them and and I thought that was interesting because I thought I was aware of time and then when I started listening to that I realized no I'm actually not because I don't know how much time and I'm you know and it ends up where I'm not giving myself enough of it so it can't consume me too aware of time though where it becomes a hindrance yeah I think that's possible in today's world especially with all the Apple watches and technology devices for keeping track of time and that's a whole separate subject but it's very connected with creativity because time is all we have I mean there there are two things in life you can manage one is work and one is time and work one of them is infinite and the other one is finite so without even talking further about it you think about that and realise that by definition you cannot manage an infinite thing right then infinite element can't be managed but a finite one can but for some reason along the way as we grow up in in the world we think that the wrong one is infinite and we think it's time and it's not true the only one that time is infinite for is God for the rest of us it's all too finite but what is infinite is work work is completely infinite because good work produces more work you know as my son once told me dad you'll never catch up I was telling Emily I really hope I can catch up this weekend and he goes you you're gonna never catch up and I he's right because work is infinite if it's good work it generates more work if it's bad work it generates more work so no matter how you look at it work is infinite you can't manage work you can only manage time and you can manage time if you know how to compartmentalize it in a productive way that works with your particular mind what I mean by that is that I think that the first step in manage managing time other than keeping track of your time like you were talking about I when I gave classes on that and when I'm consulting with individuals about their time management I always start by having to make a weekly chart of their time you ask people how many hours are there in a week and they don't even know because they just never occurred to them but there is a finite number of hours and every week and what I want to know first is what do you do with those hours exactly how many hours do you spend sleeping eating you know walking exercising talking on the phone texting emailing and and working on the things you're supposed to work on and doing errands and doing all the other things that you don't really want to do but you kind of have to do to be human so once you know that the next step is to figure out attention span because when I was a professor a say of students who would come and say they were failing history and they didn't get it because they're spending six hours a day studying history and I go wait a minute six hours a day yeah because I'm failing in it I go well it's very possible that you're spending too much time not too little time because what happens during those six hours is probably not the most productive way of studying history and we would rearrange their pattern so that they would actually study history only one hour a day but do it in an uninterrupted way and and here's what you do during that hour etc and so what we're trying to figure out is what is your attention span for an individual subject so if we know that this person can pay attention to history for one hour and after that you know her mind starts wandering then it's complete waste of time literally to spend more than one hour studying history at a time that's what I call a compartment of time so if it comes to your writing how much time can you write being fully focused and not thinking about the outside world etc and that's the compartment that where your attention span is at its max because if you're doing anything where your attention span is not at its max you are basically wasting your time and your energy and those both of those things have a negative kind of depressive effect on your motivation they're not good so you really want to figure out your attention span and then you want to arrange your life in compartments of time that have to do with attention span and when it comes to being conscious of time one of my rules has been from the very first time I started thinking of these things when I was like 19 so I stopped wearing a watch because I realized that the only way I was going to be productive with my kind of interests and activities was if I lived in my own time and did not live in everybody else's time but everywhere you look there's a clock on the wall there's big big bin on the horizon there's you know television monitors with countdowns on them there's everything out there reminding you of the world's time and the world's time is not your time you don't have all the time in the world you have your own time so I discovered a method years ago which is simply the stopwatch method which is that instead of using clocks use stopwatch and you tell yourself for example I'm going to write for an hour and a half today no matter what and I'm going to monitor that on a stopwatch and I will turn the stopwatch on when I'm actually writing and what I'm not writing like if the phone rings that I have to take it or the house burned down that I have to deal with that then I will turn off the stopwatch until that particular interruption is over with and then I'll go back until I get my hour and a half on the stopwatch and it doesn't matter you know whether you're doing it 3:00 p.m. or 3:00 a.m. or 8:00 p.m. etc as long as you get that hour and a half on the stopwatch you are you know you're in good shape so sometimes I have three or four stop watches around depending on what project I'm applying them to and of course I've got my computer stopwatch and I really look at the time except if there's an appointment or something that I have to be aware of because I'm really focused on you know my time which is the soft watches time and that's what I need to be focused on if I want to you know be in that unique category of people who create things and in my case manage people create things so you mentioned a conversation you had about work and how it's good work or bad work has never really finished and you know we're in this new age of these sort of gurus and these like success articles on you know five tips to make you more productive whatever so something David was talking about was a sustained obsession he said that he'd read and heard from so many people that most successful people are just obsessed with their work they're workaholics you think that's true there's a lot of truth in it and I've gone through that same thought process especially when writing a book about the creative mind and I don't think that workaholics is the right word for it I call it the Type C personality and because the workaholics comes from the concept of the selya's concepts of the type A and type B personality and from what I can make out the type A personality is the unhappy workaholic who can't do anything in life except work and who basically is making himself and the people around him miserable because of his work cuz this obsessive need to be working all the time and then there's a type P personality who never is very well defined and and somehow doesn't become an ideal SL yeh describes him but is somebody who's well adjusted and doesn't feel the same crazy pressures with the type a feels and I thought well the problem with that theory is that it leaves out people who absolutely love their work and who are able to live you know other full lives at the same time and I started thinking about that and realizing there are a lot of people like that and there I call them type sees in one of my books and the type C is the creative personality that loves to work would probably be rather be working than anything else but isn't negatively impacted by that at all instead they just thrive on their work I mean there's example I saw a long ago as Pablo Casals the great you know cellist was so crippled with arthritis when he got to be older that he had to be carried from his bed every morning to his piano bench and because he warmed up every day by playing a piano for half an hour an hour and but but he got to the point where he couldn't walk to the bench he had to be here he carried to the bench and then stacked on to his bench and his arms had to be lifted onto the keyboard and then he would slowly but surely start playing for an hour and at the end of the hour he got up and walked too you know to the kitchen for breakfast and he did this every day in his last 10 years and he was reactivating his body through the Curia - you know the creative process that he was very well in tune with and I realized that type-c personalities are people who have this you know creative affliction or whatever you call it this gift and but but understand it as opposed to those who don't understand it and who have often tragic endings like Sylvia Plath or Hemingway or Virginia Woolf or many others in the creative world who never understand their process who think that every time they finish a book it's the end of the world and they go into a deep depression this is very common in the creative world is to be depressed after you finish a work so when you really think about that do the solution is obvious never get to the point where you're finishing at work and that happens on the negative side for a lot of people can never finish their book or never finish their article or never finish their poem because they're afraid of finishing fear of finishing and and as a tenured professor I was always on committees judging other people who couldn't finish anything and one of my colleagues who like me had published many books we were both on the same committee judging another Kawa colleague who had not finished a single book and my colleagues said to me you know you and I would would write a book in the time it takes him to research a chapter of a book and I said yeah because I always do my research last you know I write the book first and then do the research and so I already know it's going to end but and to get back to this finishing idea of finishing a simple solution to this postpartum depression is to when you know that you're almost done when you know that your and the home stretch of a book or of a screenplay or whatever it is stop take a day off take two days off because the energy of finishing is so huge that it will easily be recalled when you sit down again to allow it into this compartment that you're using but take a day off instead and it starts your next project truly get into your next project because every creative person has another project that's dying to be next so sit down and start it and go on it do it to the point where you can't wait to go on with it and then stop and go back and finish the project you were finishing and you'll discover that there is no no no more any postpartum depression because you haven't allowed it you simply managed the time you know the finite commodity at your disposal you've managed the time so you don't have to deal with that because being depressed is basically most of the time a waste of time for an artist you can allow it for a while if it gives you great ideas and deepens your pathos and the things that you need to draw on but it's basically too much of it is a waste of time and you know one of my mentors years ago John Gardner the novelist said people should just start doing more it gets rid of all the moods they're having you know if you're in a down mood get up and run around the block and literally that works I mean if you get your body going and run around the block it's hard to be in that kind of morbid depressed state you were in before so managing your moods like that it's what separates a productive happy creative person from a productive unhappy creative person you notice I'm not talking about the unproductive ones that's a whole different subject but I'm talking about people who are creatively productive and have careers they're still divided into the unhappy ones and the happy ones and it's a matter of understanding I think how your mind is working that makes you part of the happy group and you don't have to be part of the unhappy group despite a lot of urban myths to the contrary that basically say the artists got to be suffering and tortured and all of that that's really not necessary you get more attention that way I know Julia Cameron talks about and I'm butchering this I'm sure but that the unhappy blocked artist gets a lot of attention and Pat's on the back and friends around them where is the productive happier person finds themselves sometimes alone because it's little threatening or it's it's just hard to you know yeah but being alone is wonderful so happy and the happy productive one artist loves being alone and he loves being with people too but loves being alone because that's truly when he's are under the most command of all of his powers and facilities when nothing can interrupt him and he's focused on the work that's great and getting too much sympathy I mean as the literary manager who's managed hundreds of writers over my career I think that you the ones who are unhappy and looking for attention you really get tired of them fast if you're dealing with them all the time I mean if they're in your family and everything and you only have to see them once a week okay fine you only have to see them at Thanksgiving dinner okay even better but if you're you know somebody who deals with them every day sooner or later the ones who are constantly complaining go on to your life is to a shortlist and those are not the ones you're looking for and they're what I call pseudo artists who ends up end up not being productive most of the time you know who but who are longing to be artists but don't have the mental discipline to to actually do it going back to Philip Roth again seeing interviews with him toward the later years of his life he had moved from New York City - sort of the Connecticut woods to be left alone and all of the journalists said isn't it lonely here for you and he said it is but I enjoy it there's no there's no friction there's nothing because guess he guess it was after port noise complaint or one of the he was just receiving so much attention and he was bombarded with people's opinions and this was just an easier way for him to continue and I know this is a common thing of sort of taking yourself off the map so that you can create but yet the loneliness was worth it versus the friction yeah and obviously it worked for him because other people who would go off to live in the woods end up not being productive because they they think that's gonna solve their problem I mean I learned this the hard way because I had to finish a book early in my academic career and I decided I'd go to my parents late college and just sit there and finish it and of course I almost got nothing done that summer because one thing led to the other people would stop by to visit because there was the lake and you know the lawn would need attending or the cabin itself needed fixing and I used every excuse I could possibly think of to avoid sitting down to write and this is where I worked out a lot of the the theories that are in my view of creativity is that summer because pressure is what causes creativity to work best lack of pressure actually works against creativity so as a producer I'd much rather have a low-budget film to deal with where every single thing that you do has to be a solution to the fact that you don't have enough money to do it so it becomes more creative and you tell the crew that you know we have to have creative solutions to these issues because money is not going to solve this we don't have the money and of course studio films don't have that issue they have endless pockets and so on but nonetheless you can see that if there was more discipline to them a lot of them would be better than they are when you see it a film that has six or seven writers listed you know at the beginning as screenwriters you know that this was just caused by you know they they didn't work with writer number three long enough they just fired him and brought in rider number four and that was the expensive way to do it and but there's there's a challenge in the pressure that comes and time pressure is the number one pressure more than financial even that works on behalf of creativity if you only have a limited amount of time I always found that I did my most creative work half an hour before committee meeting because I hated committee meetings and I still find that when I have to go to something that I'm not wild about going to I have suddenly extremely creative an hour before that and rather than resenting that I my my creativity around that so that that's when I do it whenever I can and I think that that's what we have to learn about our minds is how to how to kind of trick them into behaving the way we want them to behave you know to producing what we want them to produce so you talked about the type C personality and then in your book how to escape lifetime security and pursue your impossible dream a guy to transforming your career is it chapter six a day in the life of type C and I was wondering if I could talk about that how is that Dana life is it a structured day is it well it's different from you know it's going to be different for every type C and it's going to be different from from people who are not type C's and how it's different is that the type C's has learned how to arrange his day to fit his type to fit his mind to fit his or her mind some people are night owls and some people are you know early birds and the early bird writer is not going to write late at night because she not comfortable writing away at night she's comfortable in the morning so if she gets up at four o'clock she's gonna give herself as much time as she has attention span for to do her writing in the morning which is when I love to do mine because no one interrupts you from Florida to 7:00 in the morning but if you're a night owl as toking was he wrote Lord of the Rings completely after one o'clock at night because he he was so busy all the time before then and had a family and everything else so he wrote in the middle of the night and sometimes he wrote all night and and just went to you know went off to school to teach without any sleep at all but that was okay because he was doing what he loved so his his day would be arranged differently than you know the day of someone who was on a clock that's not their clock somebody wish to show up for a nine o'clock job it's not on their own clock and their day is going to be probably one that they're upset with most of the time whereas if you're you know if you're type C and you in charge of your own life you're gonna rearrange it around the patterns that work best for your mind and that I think that's a crucial part of becoming a Type C is having your own kind of day okay I go to a lot I go to meetings to sell the properties that we've developed and I don't like going to meetings because it takes a lot of time to get there and once you're there there's a certain amount of wasted time and then you do it the thing it's always fun you know even though you dreaded it so I try to arrange my day so that I'm doing something that is very productive like I wish I didn't get any work done and my wife is telling me what are you talking about you went to three pitch meetings that's it you know two at three different networks yeah I know but I don't feel like I got any work done I mean that's that's just your mental view of things and so I think that everyone's type there every type C day is going to be different and what you really need to do is if you're interested in pursuing this for yourself as you need to figure out what is your ideal day I mean is it important to you to go for a walk is it important to you to meditate is it important to you to spend next time on your creative work and is it import do you just next time with your family and all of those things and you sit there and rearrange your date to make that work that's what time management is all about and how do you do it you know no matter how busy you are there are busier people I was reading Michelle Obama's book and nobody could be busier than the president in the United States and the first lady of the United States but somehow they they made time for everything they needed to make time for which tells you that there was time management at work because certainly if anybody had infinite things to do an infinite work to do it would be those two but if they can do it you can do it too I think philip k dick loved to write at night and he would stay up all night and i'm not sure if some of it was maybe chemically chemically induced but then when he married another wife she wanted him to write from nine to five she said i'm very middle-class who's why I like these hours and so he eventually got his own apartment which he called the hovel and it was dirty and he felt that he did his best writing when when he wanted to in this you know sort of dirty apartment and it just lent to what he was doing so it's just interesting how yeah you know we're the Hubble syndrome is is interesting because I think every creative person can relate to that President Obama called his the whole and it was always a room that had to be found in any house they were in where nothing could be touched you know he could do whatever he wanted and usually their papers all over the floor and everything like and it was there that he finished a book or a speech and so on and the Hubble is the same idea and I noticed that you know I've always been the same way by the weekend my office is a complete mess there are things all over the floor and and then by Monday it's all shipshape and when you think about that it's nothing but the externalization of the creative process because the creative process is making order out of chaos you know in st. John's Gospel says in the beginning was the word and the Word was with God and the Word was God he was the beginning with God all things were made through him you know and he goes on and talks about the light let there be light etc so when when the artist creates something he is taking a bunch of little things and creating order out of them and so the externalized version of that is is living in a messy place and straightening it up when as much as you have to whenever you have to and if there's some external force that is forcing you to straighten it up then that creative person is not in charge of their own life and they can be you can always find a way to do it there's a touching short story by Doris Lessing called to room 19 I think that's the name of it - room 16 maybe in any case it's it's one of her greatest short stories and it's about a housewife who longed all of her life to have a room of her own and and it was because she couldn't she couldn't be herself in her family and she couldn't do what she wanted to do and she didn't feel free and I won't tell you how it ends because it's not a fun ending but it's a very tragic example of what happens if you don't take charge of your own creative life interestingly enough Tolkien wrote a very introspective piece called leaf by niggle strange title but niggle was the name of a painter who had this amazing vision of a spectacular forest and his vision was so clear that he could see every tree in the forest clearly every animal in the forest every leaf on every tree in the forest and because he was so busy he never got around to painting more than a single leaf that's the way the story ends up you know ends up and it's really Tolkien's agonized argument for why he had to write in the middle of the night because he determined that he was not gonna be niggle you know even though he wrote something like 40 books on linguistics and different languages and of course Lord of the Ring and the silmarillion and many other great works he felt that he had barely gotten to one tree in his forest and only that because he rode all night so that that is a terrible thing to kind of carry around is the the belief that you can do amazing things but you don't have time to do them and the answer is that's not right you do have time I mean where did Michelangelo find his time where did Lonard eventually find his time you know they all had the exact same number of hours that we have and your job is to take your vision seriously and find those hours to make it happen or someone like Alice Monroe who when she first started out was I guess raising four children and she didn't want the other housewives in the neighborhood to know that she was a writer because she thought she would get the weird label which she ended up getting and she didn't care anyway but um I guess when you you win a Nobel Prize it doesn't it takes all that away but yeah but she would do it when the children were napping and if the other housewives knocked on the door you know she would put it all away she didn't want people to know but so I realized that stigma is probably no longer today no it's it's fill there is it yeah it's it's it's a it originates in people's families and and it's it's when you you you announced to your father or your mother that you're going to be a writer or you're going to be a circus clown or you're going to be a dancer or you're going to be an actress and that is where it starts because they you know the normal response is what are you gonna do for a living and that haunt you there's another book one of my books my talk about learning as you go into the creative life learning who your true friends are and learning who your friendly associates are because you lose most of your friendly associates when you make a decision to go from a irrational life to a creative life and once they that class I gave a regular class at UCLA that was called keeping your spirits up for creative people and one time there were a bunch of actress in the class and I said at the beginning of the class I said let's go around the circle and everyone introduce themselves and tell me tell me your name and where you're from and what is the worst question that you could be asked at a bar or a cocktail party in LA and and have you respond to it and when when lady said you know she was from Arkansas and her name was Joe and the worst question that she had in LA was when he gonna go back to Arkansas and work in the post office again and I said howdy we answered that that's terrible and she goes usually by bursting into tears and leaving the room and I said well hopefully this class will find some help for that the next woman said her name was Jenny and she was from California and she said and the worst question I have is what have you been in big lately that I've seen and I said yeah that terrible question - she goes and I understood what is your answer she goes the Pacific Ocean and I always loved that because it showed that here's a creative person who has figured out how to protect her mind from the inevitable things that are going to happen in the big world people are not born with sensitivity they don't walk out of our homes on the way to a party going I'm going to be particularly sensitive today and the first thing they say to an actress they meet us what have you been in bigs that I've seen it's not because they're mean or that they're nasty people but maybe they are but it's probably because they aren't being sensitive and you having that answer instantly bonds you with them and makes them respect you for respecting yourself enough to not take their questions seriously you don't ever have to answer any question that somebody gives you unless you feel like it so when she answers it that way she disarms the whole situation whereas the first girl is not doing such a good job because she shouldn't be going to parties until she can answer that question about going back to Arkansas and working for the post office and that's a another example of protecting your mind and not protect in your mind having the introspection to know how to deal and you were talking about like whether people react how do people react to you're deciding to be creative you know I always say it's it's like there's this guy down the street who's been painting in his garage for the last ten years and you know when the neighbors are talking they're talking about a mess he's crazy you know he's a crackpot he's been doing that for twenty years whatever and then one day they read in the paper that one of his paintings sold for a million dollars and what did they what do they say I always knew the guy was a genius you know he had to be a genius to be working that hard but everything suddenly changes when the world accepts your creativity but the only way you're gonna get to that point is if you absolutely control what you're doing and believe in it yourself and even if you don't believe in it keep acting as though you do and in words you don't have to believe in things you don't have to feel good in order to work and you don't have to feel good in order to do good work you can work and normally when you work you get rid of these feelings anyway so this is all examples of dealing with the creative mind and how to get it to be your friend as opposed to be something you're scared of and don't want to take off to a cabin in the woods well I noticed with the star is born' which is now up for an Oscar we're just about a month away or so that what struck me about the film was the loneliness of the creative process and the lack of people around them when they were working on things and whether it was his drinking or whatever it was but that it was so lonely and it was just them and their material yeah they had handlers around them and dancers and different things but when they were home it was it was very lonely and I just thought that was very interesting yeah it's a kind of loneliness that you can't really describe to people who are not part of it and so after a while you stop trying to describe it maybe you go to a shrink to talk to the shrink about it at one of my clients is a shrink for creative people and probably half the people in the Hollywood business go to him and and they all have the same problems having to do with the unbearable heaviness of what they do and the fact that it is the lonely process that no one understands like I'm a producer and people say what does a producer do and I go I have to give a like Pacific Ocean kind of answer to that because it is a long conversation and nobody understands it and nobody's really that interested anyway so it's it's just that's what you're dealing with in the creative world you're trying to articulate things that are alien to most people who are not living creative lives and it's it's a burden to bear but it gets easier to bear the more the light the more likely you take it when you don't take it that heavily when you have a dog or a cat or you know something that you can it makes you feel human if you cook like I love cooking and I love playing tennis and I'm not thinking creative thoughts when I'm cooking or playing tennis I'm just doing those things so I think that you you you learn you you have to give yourself the chance to be with your own mind and figure it out and realize that you know you can control it you know I always think the creative mind has these parts to it that the artist really needs to be aware of and and the parts are there's a great big bunch of it if you imagine the mind like a big globe there's a huge continent in the middle of it that I call the continent of Reason and it is all the established things in your life it's your entire education it's it's your ability to tell time and how many languages you can tell time it's even language because if you weren't on that continent you would need a language right if you weren't communicating with millions of people you wouldn't need languages so everything that's orderly it's from that continent of reason and then there's these islands all over the place that are each individual and they don't have anything to do with the continent and on those islands strange things can happen those are the like all the visionary islands of a mind and the most most people are trained as they're growing up when they're when their parents talk them out of being a painter and and talk them into being a dentist you know or talking them out of being a ballerina and talk them into being a teller at the bank you know those people are trained to be members of the continent to be good members of the society that is the continent of reason where everything is orderly where you show up at nine o'clock you don't show up at 9:05 you know if you show up at quarter to nine that's good but quarter after nine that's the end of the job so those people are raised that way and the artist refuses to be raised that way he wants to be he wants to visit all these islands and he wants to somehow do something with those islands and eventually he wants to introduce those islands to the continent because it takes stuff from the continent like language in order to write a story it takes stuff from the continent like you know color and lines and framing to be a painter and if you don't know those basic you know can conventions you can't be a painter but you so you you learn them but you your goal as an artist is to make them different than anything that's ever been on the continent before right and eventually if you succeed and just as jumping way ahead then what you've done is now a part of the continent if you're succeeded and and on that I've never heard that's put more eloquently than in a brilliant little book called Picasso by Gertrude Stein that everybody artistic should read but one of the things she says in there every everybody thought that what Pablo was seeing was different but he was only seeing what he was seeing he was not seeing what anyone else was seeing he was just seeing what he was seen and after a while he started painting what he was seen and only what he was saying and before long suddenly we were seeing what he was seeing and that kind of explains the whole process by which an original vision gets translated into a classic you know Picasso was now considered a classic painter in terms of the history of art and and only because he saw things differently and and had the courage and strength to convey his vision and then finally his vision started catching on because somebody bought a napkin for a million dollars you know and he was no longer the crazy painter which he was absolutely before that first cultural breakthrough that commercial breakthrough and that's that's part of the excitement of it is to see how artists changed culture by sticking to their eccentric sort of anti cultural stance yeah we're talking about the artists is-is-is anti cultural in the beginning because he's pursuing his own private vision and when his private vision begins to be accepted by the larger culture then he becomes an established artist and that sounds good to the persons who live on the continent of reason but to the artist that becomes dangerous and and and fraught with peril because he was never interested in being like the people on the continent and now he is one of those people so what does he do he goes through periods of his Picasso you know he starts writing different kinds of books if he's a writer and his publishers don't like that because they like him to write thrillers because they they're part of the continent of reason and they have continent of reason invented pigeon holes and niches you know find your niche young man someone once told me find your niche because I was trying to do a magazine about dreams and the arts and he was the editor psychology today and that word niche is the continent telling you you're too far out there you know that's not going to work and okay well we stubbornly continued my editor my co-editor and I in and we created a magazine that lasted for ten years published in New York and so on but only because we ignored him telling us to find the niche but when we found that niche you know we have to think of like what are we gonna do next and that's what Picasso has to think about so he switches to his blue period and switches to his cubist period and so on just because he's now competing with himself you know his part of the culture is now earlier Picasso and that is a tremendous burden for the successful artist to bear think about Stravinsky whose greatest works we're his first works but the guy lived to be you know 90 years old but the Rite of Spring and and petrushka and the Firebird suite were all written when he was much younger so how does a guy like that live through the next 40 years with great difficulty and experimentation and and switching from composing to conducting and lots of other things he wasn't like he didn't have a worthwhile life but he was always nagged and haunted by the fact that his art was in a sense premature when it comes to healthy happy you know mental development this is the kind of issues that artists deal with and it's why a lot of people are telling you don't do that just work for the post office you know work in a secure position didn't work for Bukowski no it didn't he was a good friend when he was around and I he talked about hovels and chaos I once took my my five-year-old daughter to his house to pick up something because he was speaking in a poetry series at Occidental College that I was in charge of and she walked into the house and she set it at the top her voice they had this the filthiest house I've ever seen in my life and it's true there was toilet paper on the floor there were dirty dishes all over the floor it was a mess but you know he wrote incredible poems that moved everybody when I went to Italy as a Fulbright professor I was surprised to learn that rather than Wallace Stevens and Hemingway elif which I was prepared to teach in Melville they only wanted to hear about Bukowski his books were translated into Italian all of them and he was you know he was a mess and he was his personal life was was a mess and he kind of liked it that way he never ran out of material to write and he's one of the few who was able to sustain a long career without feeling trapped by his previous career he was happy kind of doing what he was doing over and over again I was talking about publishers wanting a writer to constantly do thrillers because that's where his niche is and that's where he should can do do fillers but the writer goes no I want to write mysteries now I want to write romance the publishers are not interested wait a minute we've made six million dollars out of you as a thriller writer and I don't know if you know you could even speak to the romance audience well I like to try well okay then we're gonna have to use a different name so a typical response is for an artist like even like Agatha Christie to have four or five pen names and write under many names Stephen King for example because they want to write different things they don't want to be repetitive and forced their art into a mold that is part of a continent of reason and that's I've always seen that those are the two big things going on with the artist my but then there's a third thing which I call the managing editor which is the part of the mind that sees this whole thing it's similar to you know meditators till I knew you there's the third eye there's The Watcher that you have to develop to see your thinking and to realize that it's not you that there's more to you than just the thinking well that's kind of what we talked about in one of my books the managing editor is the one who says I've got to negotiate a deal between the continent and the islands so that we can actually get this book done because we need things from the continent like time which the continents in charge of because on the islands there is no time things happen all in at once and there is no beginning middle and end just everything happens at once but on the continent that that's not allowed things have to have a beginning a middle MN in that order unlike the Italian director who said that movie didn't have to have a beginning middle it did have to have a beginning middle in but not necessarily in that quarter he was giving an island response to a continent question and the question was does a movie have to have a beginning middle in it he goes yes but not in that order and that's a the Managing Editors the part of your mind that sees this and goes okay we're gonna negotiate if you say I'm going to go to this cabin and write this book no matter how long you know how much it takes I'm gonna stay there until it's done the continent freaks out because it's going oh I'm going to starve to death like what's gonna happen if you never finish the book what's gonna happen so but but my intention editor works out a deal and goes no we're only gonna do two hours a day three hours a day and then we're gonna get to do it for ten weeks and at the end of that with that many hours we're gonna be done and here's the path so it could play it so the continent is allowed to relax because this intervening force has told the crazy islands it wants to write this book you guys can come out and do this but you can only you're gonna have this much time and blah blah blah within this compartment and that's that's what I think makes the same artists as opposed to someone who's not saying is working out deals like that with themselves maybe not so formally but that that's what they they do they make bargains to keep their art coin well in the case of Bukowski the the sort of slavery of his nine-to-five job if you want to call it that was the impetus for a lot of his stories and it helped fuel him and it helped give him that chip on his shoulder and sort of put a voices what so many people felt so it's almost as if it worked for him yeah and and well as Stevens who was one of my favorite American poets and oddly similar to Bukowski in a very interesting ways was selling insurance all of his life he was writing his greatest poem like Sunday morning on a train commuting from Hartford to New Haven wearing a three-piece suit because he was an insurance salesman and that's what he had to do and TS Eliot was working as a bank teller when he was writing The Waste Land so yeah ordinary jobs can be can be used to spark creativity and the artists like Bukowski in his later years found himself more and more troubled when he had an unstructured life and didn't have to you know go anywhere last time we visited with you it was before the release of the mag I believe last summer how has the release of the film and its success impacted your life Ken well it's a you know it one answer would be not at all but that would not really be a good answer of fun you know a fun answer the real answer is that it was disconcerting to be validated for something that I believed 22 years ago and that I got a lot of other people to believe 22 years ago including Doubleday to the tune of two million dollars in Disney to the tune of a million a new line to the tune of a million plus and so on and then it didn't happen and suddenly all these years later it happens and people go you must feel good to be corroborated and I said yes I do but the truth is it taught me the most important lesson of all which I wrote into it they called the waiting room if I had been waiting for the Meg to happen or for any movie that I started 20 years ago to happen I probably would be miserable if not suicidal but what you do in the waiting room is you do something else that that's how you manage your time when you're waiting for something that can be annoying and a burden and the what you have to do is other things so what I did was 50 other things as a result 30 movies have happened and hundreds of books and a new publishing company and lots of other things and yes it's satisfying to see that the world endorses what Steve Elton and I believed in 22 years ago that this was you know a hugely popular subject for a story and all the way along brave people especially bill Avery who brought it home and Lorenzo de Bona Ventura right said every other producers they made it happen too but it just I guess what it shows among other things is that don't waste time hoping for something to happen do your work and then put it out in the world and let the world take care of it that's one thing and then part of it is to trust your the work that happened when you know when you create this baby the meg in this case if it's a good baby it will survive and it will show us muscles when the time comes maybe it's been in hiding for all these years but suddenly it comes out and everybody knows it that's great but what that tells the artist I think is to focus on what's at hand what's in your workshop right now and do it well and then don't worry about things you can't control focus on what you can control and I guess that's my main feeling about it is that we did a lot of work on the Meg at the beginning we created its shape and if finally came out and it did great and am I surprised no I'm pleased but I'm not surprised because I always believe it but I am so glad I didn't hang my own personal psychology on it because if I had done that I had been you know locked up I know it's like like like myself Steve went on to write eight more books on different subjects - and built another career around his talent and he'll continue doing that he's learned that less than two that was disappointing that it didn't come out back then well it felt like it at the time that in retrospect things are meant to be and I always say to writers that I manage that every project has its own clock and the only problem is you can't see the clock so what you do is you put in the works the best you can and and you screw the screws right you know the screws on the cover and send it out into the world and wish it well and turn to your next project which hopefully you've done before you finish this what project and that's what that's what the Creator does they keep working on new projects so this role didn't or perfectly God creates another world maybe it's better how often do you create do I create well I'm always involved in at least two creative projects I've just finished three screenplays in the last 12 months and one book that was already published and a book that's about to be published and I'm always and never run out of creative things to do or you know that's what keeps me going is that creative juice that's why I I'm drawn to helping other people with that creative juice because I understand it having spent my lifetime living it and kind of analyzing it if you could be remembered for one quote what would it be your own quote oh my goodness I don't know I I see my quotes on the internet now honey I go well that's good that I said that that's that's good I mean I I think that I would probably hope to be remembered for go for it and never give up but neither of those are original my mother is when he told me go for it all the time and never give up you know was Churchill that I think those are the things that make a or you know creative writer saying is sticking to those two principles and that not don't let anyone tell you that you can't do it or you shouldn't do it or even you shouldn't do it this way because if you have a clear vision of where you're going you should stick to that vision until you can't anymore or just do it but Nike has yeah just do it you know it's funny all these these slogans I mean are universal they're not just about the creative world they're you know athletes are extremely creative I mean people who break records are breaking them because of their creativity and because they too have understood their mind and they too have this kind of managing editor inside the mind that knows how to hold off the world on one side and their vision of it on another side people say this particular high jump record can't be broken but they believe it can and maybe they believe it because they had a dream that they did it or maybe they believe it because they calculated you know that if this and if that then I could do it and maybe they just believe that of sheer stubbornness but they're only one way to test a belief in the creative world and at us to do it to just do it and and every time it's interesting people say this 3 minute mile couldn't be run you know this 2 minute mile whatever but when somebody breaks the record like that within the next 12 months it is matched or broken by three other people what does that tell you it tell you that the role of creativity in human life is to keep us moving forward as a species it's the creative people who have the vision to say this could be done that hasn't been done before this could be done better this could be done different and we listened to that and we there believe it or we don't believe it but at the end of the day if it works then suddenly everybody's doing it and and the continent of reason is reshaped by this eccentric little island vision that it came out of the blue and suddenly people believe it I mean nobody would have known what to make of you know tweets or Instagram or Facebook just a few years ago 2008 I think is when a lot of this really began or earlier it's slightly earlier 2006 and now it's hard to imagine the world without it and that's how quickly the continent gets changed by a creative change you know they people looking at art after Picasso can no longer see things the same way because he came along and changed our way of seen and that that's the beauty of being involved in the creative world was reading that a high school journalism teacher was teaching her students how to decipher tweets and fake news and that's something that five years ago we wouldn't have even been having that conversations yeah I have a really strange theory about this whole thing about fake news is that I don't even know how to say this because I I think Trump is is kind of a breakthrough cultural character I don't have any fond feelings for him and I could go on and on about that but he is an eccentric creative person he is the most amazing producer I've ever seen in my life and I can't even imagine one more powerful than he is a few years ago people around the world didn't even know who he was people in New York knew who he was but mostly in a negative way but in today's world whether you're in Thailand like I was a few weeks ago or whether you're in an island off the coast of Samoa or in Latvia or Estonia or Albania you can't pick up a paper that doesn't have the word Trump in it and his ability to get the media to do what he wants them to do is almost infinite it's astonishing and people say well he's a liar but the more I hear that over the last few years the more I start thinking what's really going on and my wife would kill me for saying this is that he is changing or maybe awakening us to our strange views of truth because I don't think he knows this I don't think it's conscious on his part but he instinctively knows that truth is completely relative and if a society decides that it's not relative then that is a social decision just like the continent of reasoning saying we're gonna agree that this is true but he's saying whatever is true we're dealing this truce what I'm saying at the moment and that's the way I look at it it's true and he's got a lot of people who believe that even though some of it sounds just plain crazy but isn't that the way creative people always sound at the beginning so I'm afraid and kind of excited about the fact that we may be going into a whole new era of post truth Europe you know no one ever quite answered pilots question that he asked 2,000 years ago what his truth but I think the world of Trump is a world that is getting closer to answering that than we've ever been before because what if we just decide that to dispense with the concept of truth we a lot of things would change but they're already changing because of him and I think it's a very strange and troubling situation but it's also kind of exhilarating because maybe it's time that we we do have a different view of what truth is and maybe we can learn something from the whole thing so I don't know if this has anything to do with our you know with our interview who paid well if we look at it writing and and fake news I mean if you look at is it Randolph Hearst or it really Randolph Hearst I think he would stage different things back in the day where you know a woman would faint on the street and then they would write about it and it was it was part of just generating content the thing is we didn't have the internet back then so it wouldn't spread as fast and it couldn't create chaos in other countries or here and then it ratified well when you look at what's happened here the American people decided with their votes one way or the other I mean I know it was the electoral college not the popular vote but a lot of Americans voted for a reality show over somebody who was just a little too truthful or whatever little too logical little too much of the continent of reason they voted for the most entertaining of the two characters so they voted for entertainment basically and that's scary I mean it's all these other actors are talking about running and some of them are already have run and actresses etc and the blurring of politics and entertainment is very dangerous but what if it changes the world and what if it changes the world for it not only the worst but what if it changes it for the better you know what if an enlightened guy like George Clooney becomes president and he gets elected because he's George Clooney gets elected because he's an entertainer you know what about what if a guy named like Ronald Reagan became president he was a great communicator though yeah well he was a great actor great communicator you know he didn't need to write his lines you know he knew how to deliver his lines so I think all of that is very interesting and it's it's about it all is about how the creative worlds intertwine with our daily existence you know in any you watch you watch the broadcasters and I try to watch fox news once in a while and I find it very difficult to watch it but then when they come back to watch CNN or MSNBC I realize they must find you know I understand how they feel that's hard to watch because both sides of the coin are manipulating views of reality to get messages across and that's what writing is all about isn't that what creativity is all about like when a painter paints something like Rothberg 'yes who would have thought you could have painted a painting with no figures in it at all just color and that's the world we're going through so it's it's kind of like we're on yet another frontier of the human minds evolution and we'll see what happens from it I'm afraid that certain things are going to be gone for good after this presidency we may not ever get any candidate who isn't a visionary in one way or the other and you know Trump is a visionary even if you think his vision is dark he clearly is a visionary he doesn't like the way things are and he's trying to break him up and only when things are breaking broken up can they be put back together again so he's a spoiler and the world is you know history is filled with spoilers and huge catastrophes and huge changes for the better have occurred because of spoilers and who knows where it's going but I think it's interesting that the you know that the entertainment world being mixed with the rillette world of reality it's gonna make it much more challenging and I think the Internet is largely responsible for that because you know the first thing if you have a certain medical condition you instantly Google and you first thing you read you know you go oh my god I'm gonna die you I'm gonna die or I'm gonna die in this really bizarre way and then you read something else that makes it look like everybody has this problem and it's not a big issue and then you keep reading and you get more and more accomplished you know confused and you wait you go wait a minute this isn't making sense like everything is out there and how do you organize it and faced with that you know you are facing the issue of creativity because the Creator is the guy who you know or the girl who looks at things and goes this whole thing's a mess I'm gonna make something spectacular out of it I'm gonna make sense out of it yeah and I think that's why the world is getting more you know more more interesting where it's going I don't know you know but it's it's going to be interesting during the the McCarthy era you know many people's lives were disrupted and many people were silenced and lived in fear and I don't know if we're in a sort of a parallel time it's not the same in terms of labeling someone a communist but it seems as if it's there's there's some similarities there and having to be quiet about certain things and with the McCarthy era how did you see the evolution of film change story well because we were on the subject of Trump and I'd like to say something about the McCarthy era and how it's different from Ari alright because I think that the difference is during the McCarthy era everyone was afraid of McCarthy apparently the entire Congress was afraid of him until they finally turned on him but they were afraid of him and so was the entertainment business and so was were the people of the country they were they were all more or less controlled by him for a while and even the media was afraid of him because he didn't want they didn't want him to turn on them and that's a huge difference because in today's world the media is not afraid you know of Trump or people who support Trump the media is attacking you as much as they are supporting him there's different media supporting hims others attacking him and I think that's a healthier environment even though it's it is a crazy environment I mean we are becoming crazier and crazier but if you can hang on to your mental you know alacrity through all of this it's a very stimulating time and it's very evolutionary time where we see where things go with this because you know his attacks on the media have caused the media to say well we're not going to stop doing what we're doing whereas from McCarthy was attacking the media the media was being coerced into silence some of the time and that that has not happened which means that the the the kind of wall between government and the people through which media operates has just about disappeared in the sense that no one feels that the governor's you know the people in the legislature and the White House and the Supreme Court are separated from us by a this wall of respect that they used to be separated by this unbreachable wall the media has gotten so powerful partly because of the internet and and the cell phones and all of that that that well is almost non-existent now and because of that it's going to cause evolution in this country and in around the world so I really call Veit causing you know evolution we just can't define yet where it's gonna go so I think it's fascinating and I'm sorry that didn't answer your question exactly that Karthi but so when when when McCarthy was I guess he was ousted I mean how did it how did it end I think that the that the Senate finally got tired of him and realized how dangerous he was and realized how see the problem was he was saying you know he was a head of the House unamerican activist house on American Activities these committee you know and if you attack him you're unamerican but after a while people started seeing the damage he was doing by having the power to call anybody an American and I think that he just was pulled down by his own he went too far and he was pulled down by his own momentum and and people just got fed up with him yeah and they saw too many people victimized by what he did and so I think it was a natural evolution but it was certainly a painful one so those who were blacklisted how did their careers then turn out once well they were out of it until you know after he was no longer in power and then they were sort of creeping back into the picture but they were never fully exonerated until after I think everybody was dead you know because that's how long it takes for bureaucracies to change you know whether the Brock receives the Academy of Motion Pictures or whether it's the US government it's still a bureaucracy and it takes it a while to make sure the coast is clear and makes some changes and so I think we're in very interesting times and creative people should be you know just sucking up all the all the inch all the facts from every direction to try to mold it into something that makes sense I mean one of the interesting things about the Trump ear is that I can't imagine people writing a story about it you know about writing a satire about Washington anymore because it is larger than life already and that's because an entertainer took over you know an entertainer is running the picture you know running the show and he he knows how to make himself bigger than life all he has to do is say a new crazy thing the next day you know we have complete peace with North Korea everything is settled everything is cool and Iran is you know building nuclear weapons and suddenly the fact what was happening yesterday with his being accused of this and that people it's not on people's mind because Media is controlled by him saying this new thing and they dropped the old thing they don't drop it completely but it goes down the Shelf to where it's not as important and because of that it's very hard to write about him in any way that is I mean I find myself much as I love The New Yorker fine getting bored writing reading the anti-trump stories because what else can you say what else can you say it's it is a reality show that we're all kind of glued to but it's entertainment and then fortunately or unfortunately it is changing the shape of American life and where it goes is up to the people of the United States like what are we gonna do at the next election and you know at this last election people decided they wanted a change but not as big a changes could have happened well then you throw the Cambridge analytic a monkey wrench and if if we think that that is true then how easy how easily let are we if all that is true if we were somehow blindsided by messages and people knowing our sort of emotional polls and then trying to play to that and how what's the question I'm not sure there's a question it's just a statement yeah and I think it's it's already happening because Facebook already knows all that stuff Google already knows it all being Google knows when you've got a cold because you you know you you Google what's the best cure for a cold today and and they know you've got a cold and in fact there's a study that shown that they can predict how many people in a city like Chicago have a cold right now simply by what people Google and they keep track of it they keep track of it all mostly with our permission well there's voice-activated ads as well no so you could be talking about kitty litter and then the next thing you know you're bombarded with ads for for you know cat products yeah and it's now it's global which is interesting I mean I we just got back from Japan and Thailand and suddenly I'm getting ad from Thailand and Japan and I don't know why I guess I guess I went on the Internet in those countries right so now I'm you know they're bombarding me with spam and although that's very annoying it's also very interesting and exciting to think that we are really becoming that global that and that wired into one big global brain you know there years ago a Jesuit philosopher named Taylor de Chardin wrote a book called the Omega Point and in it he predicted that the human race was heading for the Omega Point and that point he said was a point when we are only present we are omniscient and therefore we are only powerful all-powerful which are the three characteristics that Thomas Aquinas defined as the characteristics of God and omniscience means we know everything that's going on well we're not quite there yet but we're pretty dang closed right because people are sending us videos from South Sea Islands and from Sakhalin north of Russia and from the South Pole of the North Pole and we're omnipresent because we can be in the streets of Iran during a revolution you know we can be in the Tiananmen squared etc and and power comes directly from that look at this girl who escaped Saudi Arabia and went to a hotel room when she was about to be taken into custody by the country she was in and just tweeted until the country was forced to to take her to a safe place and to avoid returning her to Saudi Arabia this was this is power and she had this power in her hand and she knew how to use this power and this will become more and more frequent I mean it is already everywhere but next generation will have it down to a complete science of how to use this power to change the world and you know he ER de Chardin was excommunicated by the Catholic Church because of this book because he was basically saying that we were evolving toward godhood that after all why wouldn't we be doing that since it says in Genesis that God created us in His image and likeness so if that's true why wouldn't we be evolving toward being like him or her right why not and the church excommunicated him because it was not a good thing to say as far as they are concerned but of course he's now massively respected even in the Vatican for his predictions he wrote all of this in 1910 before before radio had taken off but television was you know just a anion and the mind of somebody and social networking and all of that was not yet conceived but he predicted it all he predicted that all people would be in simultaneous communication with all other people and that the world would become what form a single consciousness and the interesting thing about how creativity fits into a global consciousness is that if creativity is not nurtured that global consciousness will have no form other than what what the media give it and the media are completely untrustworthy for a single reason their attention span is microscopic it changes on a whim somebody important dies and suddenly we're no longer worried about this case going through the Supreme Court for three days you know we cover McCain's funeral and that's a little strange when you think about it when you think about reality like what's more important this particular bill that means something for millions of people or watching every moment of a senator's funeral or president's funeral well that is a media decision is not based on any deep human reality it's based on sponsorship it's based on what they can get people to pay the money to run and that's what they do so if it wasn't for the creative people we wouldn't have you know a source that wasn't based on nothing but immediate you know feedback of what we need to keep this channel open to keep CBS going we have to do this programming and not this programming whereas the creative person is like what I've got nothing to do with me you know this person is involved in making statues out of paper and you know probably doesn't even know what's going on in the world half the time so creativity is it more important than ever was because it's the different part of us it's the part that maybe foresees the future and gives us a better future to go to record or a worse one because it does um it does us a huge service when it gives us a dystopian view of the future because maybe they have a warn us from not going in that direction I remember reviewing some of science fiction books years ago for the LA Times and some of them were predicting the the the wet deal of weather changes that we're going through now and what could happen to the world and I'd like to think that a lot of the legislation that's occurred over the last thirty years was planted by some of these creative visionaries saying this could happen and you know why people can say it's not happening is simply because they don't a lot of people don't understand the importance of truth and that's that's what I think we're drifting into is a world where truth imagine if the media were in charge of truth because everybody has an opposite view of it I mean one of the things that's most annoying into these roles was watching a panel of people arguing on television because they're not listening to each other and they're all making interesting points but there's no dialogue there's no exchange there's no move forward from this conversation which is what dialogue used to mean two things coming together for the purpose of moving forward and we're not living in that world right now except in the creative path when a novel is written or a great painting is unveiled or a statue is unveiled makes us look at everything differently what are three rules that someone needs to know about screenwriting well three rules I mean that's just an arbitrary number but let's let's go with it I think the first thing that a screenwriter needs to know is everything has to be connected everything else that's the biggest difference between a screenplay and a novel in my mind is that in a novel you can get away with saying something on page one that doesn't connect directly to something on page 158 and so on but anything you say in a screenplay has to connect everything else you say in the screenplay if it doesn't the audience is going to go you know what I don't get is why that guy was wearing a red baseball cap and that's the first thing and then in the fourth scene he was wearing a blue baseball cap and then after that he wasn't wearing a baseball cap that's the guy that's the kind of thing that people say when they're having a drink or coffee after a movie right so every single thing has to connect with everything else it's much more challenging because it's almost like building a building where if one thing isn't connected properly the whole building could collapse so I think it's the first thing a screenwriter has to know and I think the second thing is screenwriters should know is that in chronological order and logical order and psychological order they have absolutely nothing to do with it the only thing that matters is dramatic order that that's all the audience cares about if you hook us properly it doesn't matter where we go in the story after that hook because we'll figure it out we'll be so hooked that we will figure it out you don't have to even say ten years later or five years earlier or whatever you can help to say that maybe but you don't have to because we're not stupid you know and that's the third thing the audience is the main character in the story not the characters and pleasing the audience is what made the great directors what makes them great is they know what the audience is waiting for in the birds you know like one of my favorite examples Alfred Hitchcock has what's-her-name Tippi Hedren walking out of the creaky wooden steps to the Attic because she hears a noise in the Attic and um she's wearing underwear because women are always wearing underwear in the last scenes of you know usually white underwear right the last scenes of horror film like Sigourney Weaver an alien so she's going up there despite the fact that she's locked in this house alone because she's afraid of the birds who have like tried to get in through the windows whose beaks you know come through the windows so why in the world would she go up those steps you know she why would she do that so if you start thinking about character or logic or you know psychological order you don't get the whole thing you know what is wrong with her this is what you're thinking you the audience's you're watching this and she gets halfway up the steps and the noise gets worse and she stops and listens to the noise and why is she stopping well there's a real good reason she stopped it she's stopping because we need time the audience needs time to catch up with the story because we need to remind ourselves we need to first say all these things about how stupid she is and why isn't she wearing clothes and why doesn't she test the flashlight that she got from behind the couch she doesn't even turn it on she's just got it of course at the top of the steps it's not gonna work but that's typical and we're going through all this in our heads but when she stops on the last step before she goes to the door where suddenly all of our inner dialogue has stopped and we're going okay actually I paid $22 to get you know scared out of my mind and that's where we are now she's gonna open the store and I'm gonna be scared and when you're ready for that then she can open the door but a person who didn't understand that the audience is the most important character in the story would have her walk up the steps would maybe you have our test the flashlight would have a whole different way of doing it but everything that a good director does is based on the audience not based on the characters or or what happens logically in the next order it's based on what the audience is paid for what are you here for and am I get a Lewis shoe or not because on that middle step where she stops you want to leave the theatre you know is the last time to come one of these stupid movies is really but okay get up and leave but if you're still there then she goes up another couple steps because he knows exactly what's going through your mind and his job is to get you to that point where your mind is blank and you're just waiting to be scared because that's what you paid for and that's what I mean by you know the it's called a lot the psychology of the audience that is the most important part of I think the screenwriting is knowing that like what does the audience want to see here not what not what do I have to do first and what do I have to expose first what kind of exposition do I need it's like how can I grab the audience by the throat and never like no let go of it what's the formula for writing a great story I think that the a great story starts with finding a character in a strange situation and working that character out of that situation and Faulkner said that that's the way his novel started is that a character haunted him and he allowed it to haunt him until he'd answered and tell questions started coming up and he gave the example of you know a novel I wrote one started with a girl sitting in a tree with muddy Underpants and her knees were bruised and she's looking in the window of the house from the tree and she's crying and he said so I started asking questions about it like why were her knees burst well know why were he's not first they were not versed and it's because she climbed this tree and she was little and didn't have any problem climbing the tree why were her pants dirty well because her brother had pushed her in the creek and that's why she ran home and why was she looking in the window because she was told not to come in the house what was she looking at in the window well it was the funeral of her grandfather and so on and when he had all those questions asked he could then answer those questions and the thing about Falcor that kind of illustrates my view of creativity is that he didn't write this down you know I always say that if you trust your mind the story will form itself in your mind the minute you start writing it down you're interfering with your mind because you're now dealing with pieces of paper and we start feeling possessive about pieces of paper and we want to do something with them we want to put them in order but what if one of these piece of paper is the good one at all well he'll forget that he'll forget the thing about her knees you know for example if that's not a good one but he leaves it all in his mind because that way it's free to form almost like an embryo anyway it wants to form and once it's fully formed then you sit down and write it out I always said people will never have writer's block at all if they simply never sit down to write until they know until they know what they're going to write when they sit down and if you know that in advanced and you just start dashing it out that's why you're you limit your time forty-five minutes an hour and at the end of it you can't wait to write more perfect now go to tomorrow and do it then because that energy will be there already whereas if you sort of run out of things to write you've misused your time management you know so I think that that's how a story starts is by some character that haunts you until you have to write about it and then you go and apply all the other rules about storytelling on top of that but basically it starts with a character and no matter how great a writer you are if you don't have a an intriguing character at the heart of it it doesn't matter you're not gonna hold your reader you're not gonna hold your audience the audience just wants to see people what's your process for developing characters how do you go about it well a character kind of develops itself and what you need to so basically what you do when you're dealing with that is you're kind of like a checklist rather than you're developing the character you're let the velvet character develop himself but you you say you know what she has to have the the following thing she has to have what's her problem you know for example is that clear because if that's not clear your story's not get it hook the audience and what's her you know what's her problem interfering with I called this mission in life like usually it's her motivation in the story their problem is interfering with her mission life you know she's somebody who wants to become a nurse but something via what happens in the opening scene that seems to make her if you want to save this person you have to do something violent back and therefore her motivation if she's going to save this person interferes with her mission those are two kind of part of parts of the checklist and you go on to talk about how does she change this is called her arc you know what is the arc of her change how is she different at the end of the story because a lot of times we are covering stories you know they're submitted to us and we go well you know the characters don't change she's exactly the way she was at the end is she is at the beginning so why do we we don't get off on that you know we don't we're not satisfied by a story where the characters don't change so these are kinds of checklist that you apply to characters once you get get them going starting with that intriguing situation and then adding along the way to you know but by just checking them against traditional characters that work well do you think the notion of the antihero has become stronger in our culture now yeah I think that you know the antihero has been around for a hundred years or more maybe longer than that actually maybe all the way back to the Odyssey because maybe Ulysses is kind of a an antihero he's most of the time he's lying and he'll avoid a fight by telling the story that disarms the fight although he gets in a few fights but nonetheless most of the time he's kind of an antihero that way because his purpose is his mission you know is to get home and it's not to just defeat this person and defeat this person so he chooses his battles and I think an antihero has been with us wherever and it will be I mean characters and you know in a lot of TV series like Breaking Bad you know definitely an antihero right in Oz arcs I mean that I think that anti heroes are all around us and one of the things that kind of we don't notice is that over the years the audience starts preferring anti-heroes on one you know one part of the audience anyway prefers them to heroes and they are therefore I'm so familiar to us that we we don't even notice that they're anti heroes anymore the other part of the audience I guess the younger part that's interesting too because it is I think a younger need prefers heroes over overt heroes Ironman and you know spider-man and all of that but I think as people get older and more experienced of the complications of life they start realizing that what's more interesting to them is an ordinary woman you know working at the post office becomes a hero against her will because she she doesn't have a better choice and that a lot of people can relate to you know I think the older you get the more you can relate to that it's easier to relate to heroes when you're younger and still think you can conquer the world so I think there's you know ample room for both and one of the things that people don't think about is the fact that oh we have so many channels now so many ways in which stories get to us in today's world that we are hugely sensitive to little story cues that make us instantly decide whether we want to see a story or not you know take take the remote that allows you to fast-forward you know you might catch the beginning of a commercial by mistake because you didn't fast-forward through it but if even a second of it catches your attention you might watch the whole commercial which is a story right but or you might fast-forward because it didn't catch your attention and just the fist occation it takes for a person to do that indicates how tuned in do we are two stories you know like you turn on your you're surfing the channels and you run across the news bit and you hear a couple of words and you go to the next channel because I don't hear that story again I've heard it I heard it enough or I I can't stand this guy's story you know I always thought the most typical human question most characteristic human question is what is your story and if we if we face people from you know another planet that would be our first question it would be their first question unless they already knew our story but in our case we'd want to know what is your story and first question on a date right like you're going you finally agree to go on a date because you want to know like what is your story and after the day you go you know I didn't like her story just didn't like her didn't like her story didn't get it what happens with the jury you know the two attorneys telling stories the journey is to decide which which of the two stories to they by which they they don't buy so the fact that we're just surrounded by stories I think means that storytelling is probably the number one human science that everyone needs to learn and know and the more you know it the better you are I mean you can tell a story and you know a couple of lines like one of the shortest stories in American literature is Richard Ratigan's I think it was called the Scarlatti tilt and it goes like this have you tried living in a one-room apartment with a man who's just learning to play the viola that's what she asked the police when she handed them the empty revolver you know the whole story is they are right and one of my favorite jokes is I want to die peacefully in my sleep like my grandfather and not like the passengers in his car in the car he was driving you know so there's a three-act story in one sentence and you know you get it you don't have to tell a 20-minute joke to get the point across and jokes are jokes or stories commercials or stories songs or stories and songs become hugely popular because they tell a story that millions of people are relating to at that moment in time so it's very exciting to be you know in this world of storytelling and and seeing masters of it you know coming along what about the artist is the antihero whether it's the writer the musician the filmmaker where their own backstory and makes them the antihero and so maybe people gravitate toward their work more if they knew they had more of a cookie cutter existence and they write this great thing well okay yeah he had a charm life it was easy for him but if somebody has more of an antihero sort of art to their own life and they're putting out work do you think people gravitate toward them more you know I really don't get your question okay it's very esoteric and it feels like you're in a graduate seminar yeah and I'm gonna fail because I didn't even get it oh okay I like I think of it as portrait of the artist as a young man but yeah try it again okay sorry I think it's my San Francisco influence is seeping out sorry someone like a John Lennon okay we know he had his own troubles you know his troubles with the government you had different things going on turbulent love affair different things what it made him more interesting would we have been as drawn to him absolutely I don't think I mean that's really his kind of Post story in a sense because we didn't know who the Veals were at the beginning right we didn't have any idea who they were we just fell in love with their music and did did it make them more interesting when we started finding out that they have lives and crazy girlfriends and you know feelings about the government no actually it made them more human and which is not necessarily a good thing for an artist you know they're in a tradition of the Catholic Church artists could say they were divinely inspired and that was cool I mean that was really good PR that was like very good spin to have but when you found out that they really weren't divinely inspired or that they were inspired by the devil and that could be a good spin to but it what happens is that when a piece of art catches you it catches you I think completely separate from its maker because it's it's like a living thing that suddenly you know exists I mean I'll never forget my first reaction to yesterday you know that amazing song by Paul McCarthy I think right it's like the minute you finish hearing the song you go that song always existed I've never heard it before and they say it was just release but debt is an eternal song and and that's the power of a work of art because it's it is now part of you know it's live it will go on living for some time we don't know how long but sometime and that when you think about it I don't has very little to do with the artists very little to do with your knowledge of the artist and when you start knowing things about the artist it starts a bit deflating your view of the art it's funny because I used to run a poetry series at Occidental College and I could invite all my favorite poets like Bukowski to my C and I learned that there was a two-edged sword in some cases I loved it like pukowski but in other cases I won't mention when I discovered that the guy is just a drunken miserable egocentric guy who who has all these pre-madonna needs and so on he's just a poet you know coming to read it at college I couldn't read his poetry the same way anymore and I thought you know thank God I didn't invite you know some really favorite poets of mine that I hadn't invited yet because I don't want to find out what they're like and that's kind of the way I feel about it it's like the artist and his work are two separate things if you create a great work it goes its own route and knowing about him is you know maybe it's a plus maybe it's a minus but in any case if I had to choose I'd rather not I'd rather not and I don't believe it all in a kind of academic approach that says you have to understand the artist in order to understand the art I don't really think that's true I think you have to understand the society that the art appears in before you can understand the art but I don't think you can understand you know you need to understand the artist and I also have a real hard time dealing with okay let's revise the past and say that all of Woody Allen's films are forbidden because he's a creep you know I I just have a real problem with that because those films live on their own in my opinion and have nothing to do with with Woody Allen anymore he created them and I think that's true all the way back to the beginning of time is that we don't have to know who Homer is in order to understand the power of the Iliad or the Odyssey you know as some professor said years ago the Iliad in the Odyssey were not written by Homer but by someone else with the same name you know or the Shakespeare controversy like who cares who who Shakespeare was his plays are amazing and yeah it's curious to know more about him but nothing I could learn about Shakespeare would change my mind about his plays I might change my mind about his plays based on something but not on what I knew about the artist so that's how I feel about you know learning about the artist I don't think we need to you don't think it romanticizes who they are let's take someone like a Marvin Gaye and you and you hear his stories and he was on top for a while he wasn't he went away I guess to Europe or forget where he went but he came back and we're starting to get his career back and then tragedy ensues so does that make us more attracted to his work not me no no I mean it might make me curious enough to look at it but then when I do let's say I've never heard his work before right and I I then go listen to it because I heard something I hope I first of all I find it hard to listen to it objectively and therefore I kind of resent that this is the way I came to him hmm you know and let's say you know Rainer Maria Rilke was a poet I love like I learned something about him and I go read his poems and I read it now through the lens of what I learned about him and I don't like that way I like to look at the work of art itself and I used to teach a course in which I showed you know examples of works of art and asked the class what they thought they were worth and I showed old Babylonian statues along with electrical circuitry and along with you know strange mix of images and a slideshow and it was very interesting to see what the class reactions were to something they knew nothing about nothing because then during the rest of the course it was about learning about these different things which one was ancient which one was now which was a work of art on purpose which one is just interesting looking and the artist it really comes down to artist what people agree is art and the purity of that is why I think create create creative people are superior in a strange way to the media because that's just a pure thing like you created this is it is it something people embrace or not if they do then you know it's very very interesting you know it's it's a successful work of art I'm not saying a work of art has to be successful because some workers of art or not yet successful like Moby Dick didn't sell more than I think 12 copies during Melville's life and then 20 years after he died it became a best-seller and that's because the world of 1906 when it became a best-seller was ready for it you know it was right in that world and it wasn't ready yet for it in Melville's world but it was the work of art even before that some people recognized that and saw it that way so I mean I all we could go on about this forever but I I don't like the what I call the biographical fallacy of having to know about the artist I think in fact I think it's a deterrent and therefore it makes it very clear to me that when people are trying to reject a person's true art you know career of art because he did something bad that just seems nonsense to me likes to me artists are kind of sacred and even priests do bad things right but they're still supposedly sacred and we're just living in this post truth world where everything you say is fraught with difficulty because you're going to offend somebody no matter what and I think we need to get vibe at so we can keep talking because otherwise we're all going to lapse into kind of terminal silence well today's Esquire today's Twitter sort of brouhaha was about the Esquire cover which and I'm butchering what it was about but the life of sort of the white middle-class male team in the age of social media it shows a young boy in a room that you know looks like a middle class home or whatever okay that's fine but I guess then yes we're leaving out many people women included whatever I'm not totally offended by it if we figure out a certain group of people's thoughts motivations whatever I then maybe we can figure out other things and and have a dialogue about it but I mean people were very upset over it and and so we were in this new age where somebody's upset about something every day and as god here's the thing that everybody you know people are upset all the time but the reason it feels that way to us is because of social media and communications you know this I mean sure it's always been that way from the beginning of time people are set all the time about everything but we didn't know that you know it took letters months and months to get across the oceans right and before that there weren't even letters how and how much upset can you show in a smoke signal right but in today's world every little upset gets tweeted you know gets email gets texted and people are upset all the time so we are in a very challenging frontier of communication where we have to learn how to continue talking given the fact that every single word you choose can be objected to by somebody you know I somebody one of my apprentices read a screenplay the other day and said she absolutely loved it but you must take out the word raping on page 96 because when raping is used in a non-sexual way to say the raping of Inca civilization for example you are going to terribly hurt somebody in the audience who has experienced it on a personal level and truthfully you know the screenplay was written ten years ago before the me to move they didn't that particular sensitivity came to the fore and but we're at the point where there isn't a word anyone could say that wouldn't upset somebody somewhere and thank God for comedians because they they have a way of turning that into fun you know for us all thank God but we all need to deal with that because otherwise we will lapse into silence or we will lapse into diatribes which is what's going on now where all we do is yell at each other and we don't really listen because we know we can't actually talk you know three people can't talk two people can possibly talk I find with you know my friends like you go or three people kind of be kind of careful for people for sure two people can actually talk even if they're violently opposed to each other but we're losing the ability to communicate because you know people say I was really offended by the tone of your email what the tone of my email a cowboy so ingenious that I put a tone into my email it was just like typing letters and they were just six words and you thought there was a tone well this is the world we're living in and it's why it's so challenging your thoughts on work-life balance well if you don't see a difference between work and life it's hard to figure out how to answer that question but I guess my basic view of it is that work is what you get to do when you're not living and so therefore whenever life interrupts work it makes me happy because you know grandkids are coming this weekend and what could be better but you know if it weren't for work life would just kind of swallow you up and spit you out at the end of the day so work is what I do when I you know when I get to and the balance is simply to let life do what it has to do like the other day of one of my friend's father died and although I didn't know him I I just decided I had to go to the to the funeral even though it was the day where I had you know a couple of pitches at the studios and so on but I just drove out to do the food to the funeral because that's okay and I didn't think about work all day and and I didn't complain as I usually do that I didn't get any work done that day because once in a while you do have to pay your your regards to life and recognize that it's there but when I think about how many people who say they want to work and do work and don't do it and I go what are you doing they go well life just keeps happening and I don't quite understand that because that person has the same amount of time that I do and that we all do and it's men of choice at a certain point I mean you can I mean we travel we love to eat out we love to do home things we love to cook we love to do all the things that people a lot of people like to do but we both you know my wife and I both work very hard because we love what we do and so I don't know it's a very interesting question but I'd I'd love you to be more specific about what you mean by it I'm thinking of um an interview I heard with Alice Munro and she says she felt like she had missed out on a lot of life because even though she became a writer later on in her life I guess she just had spent so much time writing and so she was gonna finally get to a point where she was going to stop and she stopped for a year and she went right back to writing so her feeling like maybe so much of her life had been dedicated to work and then feeling like she'd missed out on life but then realizing that the work was really the life I don't know maybe I'm sounding again like my no that's that's exactly that's exactly the right kind of complication when it comes to asking that question because the people who love their work the type C personalities like Alice Munro their life is their work it's like a vocation you know it's like a calling and if you don't do it you're not living when you're not doing it you are alive but if you are not doing it on a regular basis and you are not living your life you're living someone else's life where you're living you know anyone's life but the artist is somebody who lives their life you know their own specific life that that she's shaped for herself and and and that's why it's an interesting question to anybody who's involved in in the creative affairs because have I ever thought that way and I'm missing out on life you know maybe for a total of six or seven seconds in my life I thought that I have had other thoughts like I could be I could spend more time suffering it's a strange thought right but I had three sisters they all stayed in my hometown and I didn't and so they did a lot of suffering with the family and plenty of occasions for it with 40 relatives around and something was always going on and I felt like I could really be part of that but then I remember very distinctly that's the reason that I wanted to leave because I didn't want to be just doing that which I saw around me as I was growing up I thought you know nothing outside the box is happening here people are just being and there's nothing wrong with that yeah I'm totally all in favor of you know people and families who are on the phone all day with the latest persons accident or the laces personal diagnosis of this or that and what do we get to do and the plans for this that I actually love all that stuff and when I'm there I'll be in the kitchen you know with the mostly the women talking about this rather than the men watching a game on the in the other room I'm torn because I love that but I also distinctly knew that I had to get away from that that I that I couldn't let that consume me because at the end of the day I always believed what those people say the one thing that you can't live with at the end of the day is the things that you might have done you know the wishing that you had done a lot of stuff that you didn't do I will never have that problem you know all of my dreams have become plans and and or movies or books or trips you know they I just always did something about them and somehow it's all worked out I go to family reunions but I'm not I'm not gonna stay for four weeks and I'm not being drawn into all that except at the big moments and maybe it's total selfishness I think there is an element of selfishness and creativity and selfishness is maybe it's just an ordinary word for it but there might be more you you've you for the termination or something narcissism would be the worst word for it because there are a lot of narcissists in the creative world who are mostly unbearable I think but you do have to be willing to be yourself which a lot of people are not prepared to do a lot of people are nervous when you do it and try to keep you from doing it because they really wish they could do it but they don't have the courage to do it because there aren't any there aren't any railroad tracks that mark it out clearly you know how are you gonna get to where you're going I don't know well then that's that's very No don't you think that's very troubling I think it's very exciting yeah I don't think it's troubling I think it's exciting I think I can do it and that makes people nervous you know people who are doing their thing in a continent way a continent of reason traditional way they're nervous when people are gonna live above a garage and practice you know the drums until they're famous that makes them nervous and probably well it should I mean if my own daughter had told me she won to be an actress I would have you know no please I would try and not have said that directly but I would have had the same feelings that people have so I think that you you have to be willing to be yourself and my justification or rationalization for that is that you know the universe if you believe in any kind of a higher force did create you and if you're not doing the thing that you're dreaming of doing then you're failing not just yourself but the whole universe the rest of us - like a viewer a storyteller and that's what you're meant to be and you're not telling stories because you're afraid of this or that then you failed yourself you failed your dream and you failed all of us to whom your story might be life-saving or the funniest story they ever heard and you failed the universe they created you to dream about telling stories I used to have students who would have weird things like this I I really want to go to junior year in Paris but I'm I'm afraid of feeling guilty if I do it and I go why would you feel guilty well because my parents will have to pay for it and and my my brothers and sisters didn't get to do that and it's like oh wait a minute let me think this through with you you're afraid of guilt right okay what is guilt what do you mean well it's isn't guilt a kind of mental thing isn't it kind of imaginary I know it's powerful but it is imaginary like most powerful things in human life right yeah well so isn't it fear of guilt also imaginary yeah so either way you're gonna be dealing with an imaginary problem right you're gonna go to Paris to feel guilty in the path in the future which is speculative anyway or you're gonna stay here and feel bad for not going so it seems to me the choice is obvious go there feel guilty if you do and deal with it and that kind of thinking is what makes somebody decide to break out of the pack and pursue a creative life if they can't think their way through that then they just should stay home and you know do the job at the grocery store or whatever it is that that will make them feel not challenged by that lastly what about the fear of I think Norman Mailer said fear of mediocrity was talking about how a lot of colleges train people to want sort of a mediocre existence I'm not sure if that's true they just maybe stability but then there's a mediocrity with some of that I know Flannery O'Connor said that the problem isn't that colleges aren't you know inspiring people to become writers that the problem is that the colleges are inspiring too many people to become mediocre writers I'm not sure whether Norman Mailer was influenced by her she was influenced by him but mediocrity is a is a retroactive judgment it's not something you strive for right so it's something you if you're talking about artists he's a meteoric mediocre artists well that's you can't make that judgment until it's all done in the case of Melville for example you can't even make it ten because when it was all done he was buried and nobody knew who he was but then 20 years later he's had become the greatest American novelist so what I tells you is that the artist can't think about things like that you can't think about whether you're what you're doing is excellent or not you have to strive for excellence because if you don't strive for that you'll never get anywhere near it but you don't judge yourself based on any of those criteria because that's not your job your job is to do your art and do that as well as you can at the moment the best you can at the moment and let the world judge it or not judge it who cares your joy and your mission in life is to do the creative work and and that's all you have to worry about let everybody else make up their minds and the fear of doing that I mean the strength to do that means you've got to have a sufficiently healthy ego not a huge ego or a little ego which causes people to be egotistic but you have to have a sufficiently healthy one to truly not care what other people think I once was getting divorced and you know was worried about my children and you know what the world would think him everything else and and I was standing I'm talking on the phone looking out City of LA I had a million lights right and my uncle was saying just remember that nobody is really thinking about you was the time there are some people out there who you know know who you are and of them there are some who love you and there probably some who hate you but most of the people out there don't even know who you are so relax you know and that is very relaxing is to think that you no matter who you are there are other people who don't know who you are it constantly amazes me that people today haven't heard of half the great artists of the past but so what just if you do something great a focus on that and it will make sense out of the rest of your existence and that's all anyone can really manage I think is their own existence

Channel: Film Courage

Views: 63,367

Rating: 4.932426 out of 5

Keywords: screenwriting tips, screenwriting techniques, screenwriting 101, screenwriting advice, screenwriting help, ken atchity, writers lifeline, story merchant, movie producer, creativity, being an artist, creative mind, filmcourage, film courage, interview

Id: Y6nshRTjSFw

Length: 126min 47sec (7607 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 08 2019