Method Writing: The First Four Concepts - Jack Grapes [FULL INTERVIEW]

what is method writing oh you're starting off with a hard question well i i'm an actor and method acting is a a big school of acting that marlon brando and people like that studied under marilyn monroe and so forth and i studied method acting and it stresses um an authentic response to what your work is you're not acting with gestures you're you're being true you're being natural and i was teaching writing in which i thought i wanted writers not to worry about the technique or the style to begin with but to get in touch with their their center their their true voice so i called it method writing like method acting method writing and that was the basic idea method writing is a much more complicated methodology of learning to write from your deep truth and there are a lot of other techniques i teach that are about cinematic images so in a sense you're making a movie in the reader's head so there's other things you have to know how to do but the core of it just like with acting is to be centered and to be true so method writing is references method acting how easy is that for someone just does it do we think that we're being true and in actuality we're actually putting on errors and the audience can see that and they can see it in our writing well if it was easy to do that there would be no uh everybody would be acting it's not easy to do that that's why people take acting classes uh i always ask people what do you learn what's the first thing you learn to do in an acting class and the answer is how not to act how not to look like you're acting because if you've ever been to a play there's always some some guy that's overacting and you sense it right away and as soon as you see the cat the person acting you're pulled back from the reality of the play now of course the play's not real you know it's a play but while you're watching it you want to have the feeling that it's real matter of fact they instead of saying you believe it the theater expression is you suspend your disbelief because you know it's not hamlet you know you know these are actors but what you what you want to create is the feeling of verisimilitude truth so that the people in the audience for that hour and a half two hours can suspend their disbelief and fall into it well if you have an actor overacting uh you know right away that they're an actor and you can't get into it um that's why people study acting to learn how not to act to learn how to be natural because it's very easy to be natural in your home when you're sitting there smoking a cigar and drinking a beer but let's see you be natural on a stage with 500 people out there and you know lights hitting you from above or in a movie where there's a you know a camera looking right at your eye and there's the guy with the sound boom and you know 20 people around you let's see you relax and be real in that situation and that takes training now when you get to writing people don't realize when they're not writing authentically because they they learn to sound like writers they learn to be poetic they learn to be eloquent and they develop a lot of bad habits in the attempt to look like they're writers quote unquote so it's very hard to get people to write in an authentic way it's hard to get people to act in an authentic way but harder to get them to write in an authentic way because they really don't believe that they are not writing in a natural voice they they they have all this fancy junk that they write but they think it's oh it's some a writer look at me ma but very hard to do that to get to your natural what i call the deep voice that takes focus and it takes practice and training just like an athlete you know an athlete's got to be able to perform with a lot of pressure and act like there's no no pressure you know you can't choke so it's the same with writing you you're doing something that's unnatural you know you're right if i were writing a shopping list i wouldn't be uptight but all of a sudden i'm writing my great american novel my great poem and you know i'm i'm suddenly going to be no i'm a poet i'm a writer blah blah blah and you start to push so it's very hard to let go of that and just be real and be authentic and it takes training is it hard to write a good story is it hard to write a good story um no it's not hard to write a good story it's hard to write a great story and the only way you're going to write a great story is to be willing to write a shitty story when you try to write a good story you're in big trouble just like with acting when you try to be acting you're in trouble so again you've got to be calm you've got to be simple and if you if you write truly sometimes you might write a bad story sometimes you might write a crappy story but if you're always trying to write a good story you'll never write a great story but if you're willing to fail and write a bad story or a crappy story once in a while you get lucky and then you get a great story so for me it's like going to the races i'd rather pick a winner that's a long shot and makes a lot of money than win a lot of little races that pay only two dollars so yeah it's easy to write a good story it's hard to write a great story you mentioned willingness to fail with some of your students or others that you've seen is there something in them that they're too rigid and they can't let go of the idea of being perfect and doing everything great or excellent at first pass yeah i mean i could just quote what you just said but you see you've got to understand that as i said it's very easy to be sitting home in your living room having a beer and a cigar and be natural but let's see you'd be natural in front of an audience of 500 people or in front of a the lens of a of a camera you'd like in a movie and that lens is you know it's right up against your face man you freak out you get nervous you push you you overdo it so when you're writing it's it's a little hard to relax and just just be honest be true and get to your deep voice i have techniques in writing for how to get to the deep voice i have a thing called the transformation line which is a a certain kind of statement that you as i say you massage it it means you take it deeper and you you go deeper and deeper into it but when you're doing that you can't be thinking of your plot or your story and again everybody when they start to write they they first think of a story they think of what they're going to write about death if you know what you're going to write about before you write about it you're in trouble but most people don't want to write about what they don't know they're going to write about because then it might not be good and no one wants to take that chance so they start out with hmm what can i write about oh i know all right about that time my my grandfather slipped and fell off the roof into the fish pond yeah that'll make a good story and then they put a little start to write a good what they think is a good story instead of just approaching the writing from nothing a very zen kind of an idea you begin with nothing and see where it wants to go most people don't want to risk that because if you do that you might write something bad and people don't want to fail but if you're willing to fail then sometimes you you strike it rich can those who are worried so much about failure do exercises to lessen that to make themselves feel either more at home on the stage or at home bearing their words to people that might criticize them well i do use the term exercises um in stanislavski who did method acting he's got the word concepts and i also was in second city and did improvisational theater and even taught classes in it they use something called theater games so if anyone ever watches that tv show um [Music] what's the name of it whose line is it anyway they always have a little game they have to play so you you have these points of focus an exercise a theater game a concept and you learn these concepts and if you focus on the concept then you're not focused on the story so you can actually practice that but when you say an exercise to me every time you write you're doing an exercise when i'm in rehearsal for a play and then opening night comes i don't suddenly go oh it's opening night i can act what you've been rehearsing is not acting in the whole six weeks of two weeks of your rehearsal you're rehearsing to be true so when opening night comes you don't suddenly start acting you are continuing to do that work so to me the exercise is what you do when you are writing and if you fail now we go into a different issue which is an issue for a lot of people who are successful in life with anything people who are successful in life with anything they interpret failure differently than people who tend to be unsuccessful when when people tend to be unsuccessful they interpret failure as evidence that they're not good at that so then they try something else successful people whether you're a writer or an insurance salesman or a banker or whatever a bank robber you know applies to everything when you have learning how to juggle okay i'm supposed to drop the ball a hundred times i don't drop the ball once and twice and then i think well i can't juggle i go yeah that's that's what happens when you learn how to do something you fail so a successful person they interpret failure as what's supposed to happen you're supposed to fail and then you keep doing it and you fail some more and you fail more or as samuel beckett said fail try again fail again try again fail better in other words i'm supposed to fail and when i fail it means i'm on the road toward learning how to juggle successfully so that's the real difference and the way to prevent failure is to always aim for good because ultimately everybody can be good but to be great means you have to risk failing and unless you're willing to risk failing you won't be great so when people fail at something they go oh i guess i'm not good at that but successful people interpret failure as yeah i'm supposed to fail and i'll keep failing and eventually i'll get better and i'll learn how to juggle and i'll learn how to do it so that's the key it's not about failing it's how you interpret failure that's the big difference and you're more nervous than i am oh yeah no i get very nervous but i i'm hoping to i like it yeah fail better each time and and not just aim for good well see that's another thing my acting teacher used to always say uh when you're nervous before performance don't try to get rid of the nervousness bring it with you into the scene because it's a it's an authentic emotion and as he put it never deny an authentic emotion on stage or in front of a camera never deny it never try to cover it up so if in the middle of a scene you start laughing laugh if in the middle of the scene you're nervous let that nervousness be there when i do a poetry reading i am always ask my wife she'll tell you my palms get sweaty and i'm a wreck and and i want to be i know that's good i go okay good it means i'm alive because if i was dead i wouldn't be nervous but if you're alive you're afraid of failure and if when you're afraid of making a fool of yourself in front of 20 or 100 people you get nervous well that's good i should be nervous and what i try to do is not to dissipate it the nervousness is really my friend because it means i am connected to this moment when i get up and i open you know my book of poetry and i go okay my first poem is gonna be you know blah blah blah if if i'm confident i i i'm gonna be boring you know confidence is really pretty boring you know there's nothing worse than seeing somebody think they know everything it's it's boring when you're performing when you're acting when you're reading so if you are nervous hold on to it it's your friend let it be and when you start to read whatever that poem is a story if the poem makes you you're nervous it's because there's something at stake you might be writing about the time your father came home drunk and you you tried to stop him from leaving and you pushed him down and he fell and here you are 12 years old and you feel like you just knocked your dad out or maybe you're writing a poem about when you were in in italy and you were 19 and you got a phone call from the father of the boy you were traveling with and he tells your son you have to come home you're the man in the family now and you don't even want to admit that you know what that means so you say what i i don't understand of course you understand he's telling your father died but you know what i don't understand he said son you're the man in the family now well you know that's that's a moment that i really relive and remember it was like my whole world caved in i was in lake como in italy and uh it just changed my life it just i i never thought that would happen i my father was like the most important man in my life and uh if you're writing something about that then you should be nervous it should bring you into the heart of your feelings whatever there might be for me it was absolute terror just terror that i would not know what to do i felt my father was the wisest man i ever knew and that even though i was 19 i felt that he would tell me the secret of life and he hadn't told it to me yet but he was going to and when he died i thought i'll never know what the secret of life is i'll never know how to survive because i want to be an artist and i don't know how you make a living as an artist so maybe he would tell me but he wasn't there anymore and i was like lost for years because of that and even now when i'm talking about it i'm i'm getting all i'm feeling that feeling i had when i was just scared shitless about life that i wouldn't know what to do and you know the funny thing about it is it's been i don't know 60 years since my dad died and i'm still not sure i know what the secret of life is and i'm still not sure i know how to survive i can't believe i've survived this long but i have but i don't believe it i don't i don't get it i don't understand it i don't know how people survive you know i always think they know something i don't know so nervousness is good how are how are father's days for you how what father's day june 20th how was that father's day you mean when when i'm the father of my son and any any time father's day comes up i i you know once my son was born it was more a question of me being the father to him and so that's what father's day was for me that you know he would uh get me something or write me a card and every card he wrote i've saved them i've got him on the on my bookshelves you know so i can see him and you know he always would make me a father's day card um you know i never thought about that um i i think about my father so much or did think about him so much that i don't think i reserved one day that today is going to be the day i think about him i thought about my father so much especially when i was unsure or in trouble or worried or whatever i would think what would my father do what would he say what would wha you know what would he tell me so i i don't need father's day you know i but he died when he was 54 i think so when i made 54 i remember thinking okay because i always thought will you live to be as old as he was at the time 54 seemed like a very old but when i was 54 i i felt like i just got started my son was about five years old so i became a father when i was 49. so um you know i uh at 54 i thought okay all the okay now it's it's it's me you know it's not him now it's now you know it's my turn i've got to do it so that was a big year for me when when i had turned 54. was it easy for you to write about this i've written about my relationship with my father many times in different ways and my mother too who was a kind of a crazy according to my therapist a paranoid schizophrenic so i wrote about my mother too but i've written about my father i've written about being a father when josh was born and i would have to go to safeway and get diapers and enfamil the the milk you know that you drink so i've written about father issues quite a bit you know bukowski has that great poem about his own father when he goes to his house after his father dies and he puts on his father's suit which hangs on him a little loose um the poem is called the twins because he looks at himself in the mirror and he thinks okay now i'm my father so we could be twins so i guess you wrestle with your father one way or the other those who've had good fathers those who had bad fathers my dad was wise man a great man loved by everyone he also had a problem uh he was an alcoholic and a lot of anxiety in my family growing up i'm a quote adult child of alcoholics you know that that was the thing um but i didn't i don't know if i wrote about him a lot after i got to be 54. i think at that point i kind of thought well okay i got this far without knowing anything maybe i can i can go the rest of the way without knowing anything and i still don't know anything you know every day when i wake up in the morning i said you know i i try to guess what time it is by the light you know the light outside that beginning of dawn and i try to guess what time it is and i'll i'll look over and i'll see what time it is and i'll think to myself okay another day another day to write your poems and teach and be you know love your friends and love the world so that's a long answer to to a very simple question you asked where's the green tape no i don't want you to talk it's great i like it i know there's a lot of emotion i remember there was a clerk at a grocery store and i'd seen the person many times and i was sort of friendly with them and and i'm not it was father's day and the clerk so i forgot what happened and he said you're not wishing me a happy father's day and i could see how hurt he was and he goes you think that just because i'm older i don't you know and i could just see it was like a real wound to this person yeah and i i said to him you know the reason i didn't wish you that is because father's day wasn't a thing for me i never knew mine so that was why so we were both coming to it with these two different things but yeah i could see even he was he was still you know this was very hard for him and here he was behind this cashier trying to save face and you know i just remember that being a very um interesting moment i never forgot it yeah we don't have a lot of moments like that with people we don't know i kind of knew him just just i would joke with him and and i actually never saw him after that i don't know what happened to him but hopefully he's okay but um anyway i'm going off on a tangent but i guess what i'm trying to say is that we don't know some you know fatherhood motherhood all those things are very these are very sort of deep you talk about the deep voice that yeah these are things that we all carry our own wound or whatever with us you know yeah and um you don't know whether you're supposed to play a role or what is it to be a father you know i i remember when my wife was pregnant i when she called me on the phone to tell me she was pregnant the first thought i thought was okay now now it begins meaning i have to take life seriously and then the night her water broke we were watching sleeping with the enemy a movie on tv and it was about 11 o'clock at night you know you you always want your water to break in the morning so you can go to the hospital and you've had a good night's sleep but no it was 11 o'clock at night we were exhausted and water breaks and we're driving to the to kaiser and i i stop at a ralph's or something and i get ice because they said something about you know she can have ice or something like that i don't know what it was but i went into the ralphs with the neon lights and everything was real bright and it was 11 11 30 at night and again i just had that got a little ice chest put the ice in i remember thinking okay this is it you know we knew it was a boy your son's going to be born very soon and your life is going to totally change so there was that feeling that everything was going to be different well nothing really changes you just go on day by day being and dealing with what you have to deal with but in my imagination i thought you know it was like okay showtime you know it's like you're doing a play and they go you're on and then you have to walk out there and i'm the father where's my lines and they go uh uh there are no lines i go what do you mean i go well we don't have any lines well there's got to be lines i mean i'm a father what's what's the what's the you know what's the role what do i got to do and they go oh i don't know and they go are you a father yeah but i don't know what the hell to do well anybody here know what to do no i'm in front of 500 people here what am i going to do well you got to be a father yeah but what is that about i don't know so you just go and do it you know that whatever role you think it is it's not what you think it's going to be i remember when josh was in third grade i was driving him to school and my son is very stubborn i don't know where he gets it i think he gets it for me of course he's really stubborn i mean you know you don't tell josh what to do and we're in the car and i don't know we got into something he and i and my wife would always say don't make it a fight you know i couldn't help it you know i'm gonna hold my position he's gonna hold his and before you know it i'm kind of yelling and screaming and we're just driving it's a mess we get to school and it was my day to go to the kids and teach them how to write poetry so i tell them you know write about something true and anyway i walk around the room and watch what the kids are writing just to see if they're doing okay sometimes a kid maybe doesn't quite know how to get started and i help him and there's my son writing about me yelling and screaming in the car now i usually have the kids get up and read and there was no way i could not have him do it if he wanted to because i that would be a bad lesson to teach him so when it was time to read i said okay who wants to read first josh raises the sand i go so he walks up opens it up and he's writing about being in the car with his dad who's yelling and screaming and the kids are like i mean they're they're loving it and at the same time they're a little shocked and i know they're all looking at me they want to see how am i going to react to it and i just listened to it like i was listening to a piece of writing and then when he was finished i went good good i said you know the part there where you mentioned that you could write a little more about that you know make it now as i responded to it like it was a piece of writing worthy of being commented on uh but you know how do you plan for something like that you know there are the kids i'm the teacher and he's writing about me and you know being a kind of uh not very empathetic father so you know i don't know whatever's in the handbook it wasn't in the handbook i got you just sort of stumble your way through and hope you do your best i think that's why in saving private ryan um at the very end of the movie when he he goes to the grave of the major who saved his life and you know he's an old man now and and he hopes that that his life was worthy of being saved i broke down in the movie theater because the way i related to it was at that point when i saw the movie i hope my life will be worthy as a father as a husband as a friend and a man i was just it's probably the most i've cried in a movie ever in my life when he said i hope my life will be worthy so you make a lot of mistakes you fail right you fail and when you fail you you got to go well this is what's supposed to happen and that day that josh wrote this piece about the car ride over that was the deeper voice yeah it was a deep voice and he was writing about something that was like pretty brave gutsy of him to write about that you know i mean i'm his father i'm the teacher i'm coming into the classroom as the teacher teaching everyone how to write and i'm telling them a matter of fact i read a poem by my own father come to think of it that's part of the lesson so he went and did it you know bravo for him so like i said you i i had to validate that i couldn't one tell him no no don't read that josh it'll make me look bad well if it made me look bad too bad because what he wrote was good and as a teacher and as a father i have to reinforce for him that this is how you make art you tell the truth you you take risks you write about what's hard to write about you see in literature there are four basic voices or tonalities well five if you count your own voice your natural speaking voice as a writer so the other four there's only four other tonalities in all of western literature and um i have a standing offer to any of my students if they can comb any piece of writing from homer to the present and find a page or a paragraph or even one sentence that's not one of those four then i will give them and and i have a one of those play money says a billion dollars and i hold up the billion dollar bill and i go if you can find your sentence it's not one of those four and i hold up the billion dollar bill say i'll give you a billion dollars and so far no one has collected it so there's only four basic styles or tones or voices depending on how you want to look at it in all of western literature beside writing in your own your own tone and then there's the other four and those other four are uh tommy billy sarah and becky oh okay oh i know becky yeah um well one of them is what i call straight talk all the the the names i use come from a poem by another writer so nikki giovanni has a poem called straight talk so i use that in other words and these would all be writing in your own voice i cover that how to get the voice deep and all that in my uh my first book on method writing called method writing and then the four voices that you just asked me about i cover in my second book it's called advanced method writing and at the bottom it says the art of tonal dynamics so it's how to take these four tones and use them the way uh a composer of music would use different kinds of musical percussion effects and you know whatever because tones change in music very deep and then suddenly it becomes light and so forth so the four tones that i have i have names for him straight talk means you're not in the deep voice you're very chit chatting everything is boy you won't believe what happened last night i mean there i am standing on the corner and would you believe it a guy comes up and he's got a cigarette in his nose and i thought you know very chit chatty the opposite of the deep voice the second voice is uh that writerly poetic style that a lot of writers use and that a lot of writers think you're supposed to write like that where you give metaphors and similes and fancy description and all that kind of stuff and on a scale of one to ten you could do it in a subtle way or you could do it in a very extreme way so for instance if you read william faulkner or marcel proust these are writers who write in a very ornate style almost out of ten but then there are other writers who use a little bit of style but they're only at a one or a two but it's all not writing in your natural voice it's a heightened style then the third voice is the oldest technique in all of writing it's where you repeat it goes to the bible you know it goes all the way back to the bible where you you repeat things three times four times five times so a lot of your great politicians or preachers will use this voice i have a dream that one day blah blah blah blah blah i have a dream that one day blah blah blah blah blah i have a dream that one day blah blah blah nobody remembers the blah blah blah but everybody remembers the i have a dream speech because by repeating it he makes that a kind of drum beat a rhythmic pulse so that is the most ancient form of writing that was how people remembered because people couldn't read so even if someone wrote something they would they would perform it the repetition of phrases uh it was the best of times it was the worst of times from charles dickens or the bible there's a time to to be born and a time to die a time to plant and the time to sow a time to buy in a time you know the repetition creates a way to remember because people couldn't read so you had to know to remember so that device that repetition is a technique that can be used in more ways than you realize so when i teach it first people have to know how to do it you know it's just how to do it then you learn many different ways you can use it there can be subsets of the repetition with different repetitions abraham lincoln's gettysburg address see these people around that time they studied what was called the the greek and latin revival and that was one of the things you studied if you went into politics or into religious preaching was the repetition you studied that so lincoln's gettysburg address comes directly from that where you you repeat something he talks about in the gettysburg address we've come here to uh dedicate a portion of this field as a final resting place of those who here gave their lives that you know we may live blah blah blah and then he goes but in a larger sense we cannot dedicate we cannot consecrate we cannot hallow this ground so we cannot we cannot we cannot if 237 words i think is the gettysburg address if you go through it you will find five or six places where lincoln repeats something like a mantra three four sometimes five times in a row and he does it at the very end at the very end that this nation shall have a new birth of freedom and something something what is it do you remember how he ends his speech of the people by the people for the people so that's a repetition that is a technique that he learned in in his studies so that's the third voice then the fourth one is actually not a voice it's where you use language in a non-communicative way where you're writing almost stream of consciousness or or absurd images or maybe you've got someone who's got alzheimer's or someone is drunk but it's language that is not used in a normal linear way and poets and writers have been doing that for at least over a hundred years started in france with arthur rambo and baudelaire and and then the russian futurists were doing it they created the thing called zom poetry that didn't make sense and so forth so any writing that is kind of like modern art where you have cubism or abstract painting or abstract expressionism where you're just seeing a lot of crap on the canvas well what would be the analogy of that with words well it would be words and sentences that don't make any sense in other words i did a whole book of what i and i called it absence of field because there's no logical feel to it it's all disconnected on the page so i kind of took that idea and i have a book called lucky finds in which i put it all on card so when you when you got my book oh i'm back it's called lucky fines so but actually it's not a book it's a bunch of cards and if you and when i teach in in the classroom with kids i lay all this out on the floor and the kids absolutely love it you know i just spread all the cards out on the floor and they're you know they're just i mean things are this way in that way and i hand drew those letters that you see there what is that there's another one there's another one i'm just curious what what are some of like if you chose one last they're different letters so yeah they're hand drawn okay i draw them and sometimes the writing is upside down and sideways i'll do a different font but each piece is kind of a um it hangs together in a way but it's up to the reader to figure it out something like that but when i show this to kids in school we spread all the cards out on the floor and then they make their own and they get they just love it they they absolutely love it um see on this one you got to read it this way then you got to turn it upside down and read it that way oh here's one where i just have a lot of negative space and it just says carbon cycle illustrious and then there's those two letters so you know i play with the forms so it's not just like you're reading a story or a poem it's all broken up there anyway there's 52 of them and it's called lucky fines because it's like you come across something on the pavement and you pick it up and go oh a quarter a lucky find for a new writer should they try these different tonalities or personalities or just stay in the beginning with their authentic voice and then once they have mastered that then venture out to these other sort of areas well you know as i said i'm kind of an old athlete and i learned boxing and swimming and football and basketball and how to play golf uh i always notice that when you're being taught you're being taught from the ground up uh you you're being taught basic movements and then you build on that for instance when i was boxing um i spent a long time not being allowed to throw punches everything had to be footwork and i thought come on when do i get to punch somebody but when you learn footwork you discover that a punch will have as much strength not as your power here but in your legs and if you are balanced when you throw a punch and if you are transferring the energy from the legs to the body you get more power so everything depends on the legs and and the stance same with tennis when you're playing tennis if if your feet are too close together or too far apart you don't have as much balance or power so one of the things you learn playing tennis is you're learning to run to where the ball is and then plant your feet correctly before you swing because if your feet are planted correctly then the swing you know if you learn how to do the swing that would be the next thing uh but you foundation is very important so in my first class in method writing it's all about the voice how to manipulate the natural voice and yeah you practice we we have exercises that you do from week to week and we work on that then when you go to my advanced class now we work on the four voices and again you're practicing and at some point uh we have an exercise where you get a pair of dice and you throw the dice and each number corresponds to one of the concepts you've learned up to this point so if a number two comes up and let's say it's the the fancy schmancy voice you've got to write four lines of fancy schmancy then you roll the dice again oh six comes up what is that oh that's uh straight talk well hey one you won't believe what happened but it's all the same piece it's a it's all a coherent idea or story but you're switching every four lines and so everybody thinks oh it's not going to make any sense but it ends up making perfect sense because you're changing tonalities and it's the change of tonalities that makes for drama more than just the drama in the story i don't know if you fully get that the story isn't where the drama is the drama is in the tonalities that you switch and great composers when they write they don't just write the same note 100 times they're changing uh when when beethoven took my class early on he had written a symphony and he brought it in and the opening of the symphony went this way [Music] it's a little boring you're doing nothing with the deep voice why don't you do like the straight talk voice you know where you you get high like that and he said oh well i've got to try that i better do that next week and then he comes in next week and he did the deep voice but then he switched to that very light voice so now when you listen to the fifth symphony it goes [Music] very good ludwig you're getting the idea of tonal dynamics you want to switch those tones so when they do that dice thing it surprises a lot of them they go wow that really worked the piece made sense those changes in tone didn't give the read a whiplash it just felt like good writing and good writing is tonal dynamics and one of the reasons why a lot of people's stories are boring is because the voice is the same all the way through can we practice something can can we yeah together can you give me an assignment and all and then correct me good night are you gonna write it or you're gonna say i'll just probably say it just maybe i don't know if i was in the class okay and you were testing me to say it i mean it's about writing but okay uh i've given you the four voices right plus writing like you talk right so you got writing like you talk you've got that that high voice that's a lot of chit-chat stuff boy you won't believe what happened and then man you know knock me for a feather but i was there you know then there's the fancy voice poetic very lots of images metaphors similes all that kind of crap and then there's that written song where you take something and you repeat it anything it doesn't matter whatever you say you can repeat it three times whatever you say you can say it twice whatever you say you can say it louder whatever you say you can say it softer whatever you can say you can say it with more feeling whatever you say you can say it deadly knows any phrase is repeatable you just have to repeat it and then add the rest of the sentence the rest of the sentence is what would be different see in a larger sense we cannot what dedicate we cannot what consecrate we cannot what hallow this ground so that's the repetition and then uh the last voice is total nonsense now do you want to do it does that work yeah you want to give me a topic i i couldn't oh no we don't do topics you don't do topics okay i'm sorry i don't do whatever you don't do no we don't do topics i gotta call your manager here then so you're just gonna in other words i'm i'm gonna call out the voice now what i want you to do is just to talk and if you talk eventually you'll probably get into something you remember or something will come up don't worry about it so if you fail who cares you know whatever right yeah okay however i will say if i say straight talk or if i say lost world that's fancy schmancy if i say red and sung that's the repetitious voice if i say absence of field meaning no rhyme or reason just nonsense and if i say like you talk just talk like you talk okay so you'll just start blabbing about anything are you ready i think so yeah okay ready go okay noticing that food prices are going up a lot it's things seem very expensive and uh i'm not quite sure why but um straight talk it's it's really you're going into the market and i'm noticing a dollar increase in what i normally buy now you're still talking like you talk you got to get that high voice i went in the market like god what am i crazy did i get you know okay gotta go up there okay so keep going straight talk so i'm at the market the other day and there's this woman and she's in my way and i'm trying to get to the food and the stuff is not on sale like i thought it was supposed to be and then i say that sorry that one is the repetition repetition the food that we eat brings us life but if life brings us nothing but bills and duty and chores and errands and they they don't take us anywhere lost world fancy schmancy oh um according to the gdp uh let me know let me rephrase that it's hard to do it with you because we don't talk that way no no no see it's almost as if i'm writing a a letter or something um it has come to my attention that food prices have escalated beyond the normal day-to-day more poetry come on okay fancy schmancy it has come to my attention that food which is life which is what sustains us which is what gives us a reason to be with our loved ones and and break daily bread and and love love one another and and come together as community good but you're not writing in that style you're still talking like you talk okay it would have to be poetic okay i thought it was because no no you were doing uh not goods phrases okay but you could talk that way okay so but you got to write poetically and what's the one that's abstract because life because life streamed out like a rhythm upon the cloistered hills of of existence breaks however many stars that fuel the clouds that break into the heart and expose the truth of your own soul rigid against tribulation striven against death broken open against life the platitudes of existence and the small icicles that form inside the caverns of your soul break out of you you know that's but that's lost world you've got to be able to do that okay wow okay and it's hard to do it when you're talking see that's why this is about writing it's not about talking so it's harder for you to do that but that's what you would have to shift into and then keep going absence of field and that is where i'm almost asked not what your country can do for you no you're making sense oh okay well okay um so food life love death honor that's a field because you're saying one word at a time each one is different but that's a field it it's a it's a logical progression so each unit can't be the same as the one before or else you're establishing a field like an electrical field a gravitational field this is no field so the words and the phrases are like all jumbled up but if you just do the same thing that's a field so you could do two of them but then the third thing has got to be a phrase then another phrase then something doesn't you know you got to just keep breaking sentence structure around you have to practice these things they're not as simple no this is difficult you know very difficult custom shaved nether of any kind of the sofa retains black teeth of soft there in the eyeballs of no one came it father hair broken nostril the shiny light of the sea that protrudes over the waves here nowhere stream captain broken arrow it's always in the gut of nothing was done he was a champion see i'm just that's absence of field nothing can ever connect or converge you can't have a field writing a sentence is a field subject verb object preposition you know it's okay sentences are fields this would be an absence of field math gold belly of the beast golden wheat air something long now because you've done a lot of short things ask not what your country can do for you good but don't finish the sentence ask not what your country can and then stop see okay but that's a technique that's been used in writing in the 20th century by a lot of writers including james joyce this stream of consciousness and you might do that if you were having a character who was either having a hallucination or they were demented having dementia or someone is falling and you're trying to what it's like to be falling what goes through a person's mind not in normal sentences but everything is colliding because it's all happening in five seconds as they're falling so you could use the technique to con someone's drowning you know you would use absence of field for that and so in in these four other tonalities not the the regular voice quote unquote that sharpens the the tool that that strengthens the muscle how does that help do you pay attention to how the writer is working or do you just enjoy the story depends depends on whether i'm playing something or reading something and there are other distractions going on okay what about music do you listen to any kind of classical music at all yes i have well have you ever listened to bruckner and really paid attention to what bruckner does compared to let's say brahms bruckner is absence of field a lot bruckner's got tonalities and changes that are very mysterious and very sublime whereas brahms has got these melodies that roll over almost like to be read and sung so if you pay attention to writers and you pay attention to composers and you pay attention to almost any kind of art picasso any painter you will see that they do different things all the time yeah they might have their basic i'll say writing in their own voice uh approach but they use all these other techniques the next time you read a book you know a good novel i promise you you're going to see writing like you in your own voice you're going to see lost world which is poetic you know fancy description or something you're going to see red and sun once in a while look charles dickens opens up tale of two cities with was the best of times it was the worst of times it was the season of this was the winter of discontent you're going to see repetition you're also going to see absence of field sometime where the work is very uh stream of consciousness whether it's james joyce or virginia woolf or tony morrison or writers who do that you're going to see it but you can't be reading for pleasure you have to be reading like you're paying attention i know how to drive a car i would have no idea how to fix the engine but a mechanic he understands how the engine works and when people look at writing most people they don't look under the hood to see what's going on they just learn how to drive and turn the wheel and start and stop and go fast and go slow but a writer if you study writing that question you asked ask me karen you will go oh look he just went from writing like you talk to fancy schmancy oh look he just went from fancy schmancy to straight talk holden caulfield catcher in the rye does it all the time so you will see those four tones and the tone of writing in your own voice you will see that being done just the way beethoven went uh you will see these changes of tone of tonality of dynamic that's why i call it tonal dynamics because it's dynamic it changes so you're going to see it in literature all over the place so was the first part of becoming a better writer to pay attention not just to your own writing to other works of art not even not even literature but music there's no great writer that hasn't paid attention to almost every writer that came before them going all the way back to gilgamesh the iliad the odyssey augustine's confessions catullus's poems in the first century bc uh you know dante they they know it all and they don't just read for pleasure they read like a writer they read like an artist they pay attention they study oh look what he's doing look what he's doing and then they copy it a little bit and then they extend it even further you know artists are always influenced by the artists who came before them and then they go one better so yeah whatever you do whether you're a sculptor or a painter or a writer or a composer um yeah you've got to study the people who came before you and see what they're doing because it's it's a conversation artists are talking to each other across the millennia they're talking and you want to see what the conversation is you want to know what dante said to shakespeare and what shakespeare said to homer and what homer said to uh phillip roth or ann sexton you know what are they saying not in the met in the message but in the technique in the technique oh oh look what braum look what the bruckner did look at the way he extended that chord and did a variation that was interesting that was different from anything beethoven did oh look what mahler did look how he did that you study it any composer you ask them man they've studied them all so being conscious and you want to see absence of field check out elliot carter oldest he might be dead by now but he was in his hundreds 100 the last time i heard he wrote a string quartet just recently listen to beethoven's last six string quartets a lot of that is absence of field as a matter of fact if you listen to beethoven's um piano sonata 110 or 111 i can't remember which one it is i was listening to it one day and there's like a four bar section in there that if you hear it you if you're listening you'll hear it it's jazz where he got it i don't know i mean boom but if you listen but all of a sudden it's jazz and then it goes back to the normal kind of progressions that they did in beethoven's time um so his string quartets his late piano concertos you're going to hear a lot of stuff and you're going to go well where'd that come from how did he do that because as an artist you always want to see not what did they do but how did they do it how did they create that it's not about the plot or the story it's about the technique how did they do that how did they do that how does a writer know they have written something in their true voice i think you you know you you know what what true writing is you know you know what it is i mean i know when i'm bullshitting how do you know you just know i i know it actors know it even in the middle of doing it actors can be in the middle of a play and at some moment they can go oh i'm bullshitting and then actors have techniques to get them back grounded they look at the other actor they connect with their being as opposed to acting so you know when you're bullshitting now with writing it's not about whether you're not being true it's about are you writing sentences that you wouldn't speak that's the difference between writing in your own voice and writing in those other four tones that are not a natural voice red and sung lost world to be a straight talk and absence of field those are not natural voices those are literary you you wouldn't write like that were it not for the fact that we live in a post-literate era age i mean you read books so you have learned from school how to write like a writer you you write that way all the time you use prepositional phrases and and participle clauses because it's writing you you put in adjectives and adverbs like you bought a stamp collecting kit full of them and you're using them you wouldn't do that if it weren't not for writing if this was a pre-literate society everything you write would be like you talk because there would be no other way to write but once you start developing these these techniques or styles then you learn that in school and you mimic that when you write and when you want to be a writer you throw in adjectives and adverbs and fancy verbs you don't say he said you say he responded when was the last time you were talking to someone and saying yeah and i came home and uh i asked my brother what he was doing and he responded by saying but no you never do that you say i said you know where did you go last night and he said well i stayed out and i said the whole night and he said yeah the whole night and i said you know you're going to get in trouble with mom and dad and he said that's how we talk we don't go he responded and then i murmured and then i averred and then i retorted you you learned that in school you wouldn't write that way unless you learned it in school from writing so you attune yourself to the difference between writing like you talk and writing in a literary way just like a a musician knows when they hit a flat or sharp note they hear it so if i'm okay i'm sorry you can hear it if i'm writing and i know that not that it's garbage but it's it's not true it's not authentic it's bs as as to what you said earlier okay could you what do you mean by true well that's what i'm trying to determine well but writing and something being true are two different things okay i can lie but i can do it in an authentic voice how is that we do it all the time we make up stories we lie well all of a sudden we lie we start doing it like a writer if we did that everybody would know we're lying sometimes we lie better than when we look the truth is just the facts saying the truth like you talk is the issue lying like you talk is the issue ask me to make something up okay um let's suppose you're an attorney and you're presenting your client's case and maybe you know your client's guilty but this is your job to defend the person the person's uh may be involved in a ponzi scheme and maybe they had kids to support and their back was against the wall and they had to do what they had to do and it's your duty to defend this person and which one of those sentences you just said are not like you talk it's your duty to defend this person i don't think i would say that you wouldn't say what it's your duty to defend this person you wouldn't say that i don't think so you just said it right but i don't think i would say it in my real voice that is you that's your sentence okay you're not talking like a writer you're talking like a person a poison okay you're writing like a joke okay so then help me out here so because we're doing like a little bit of a yeah okay okay so so then is that my authentic voice you can't talk like a writer you don't know how to do that but you know how to write like a writer because they're two different things and it's very hard for someone who thinks that writing fancy is how they talk to say to them no don't do that you wouldn't use that adjective there you wouldn't use that adverb there if you were just talking then people have to just like with acting sometimes people are overacting and they don't even know it oh they think they're great but they're overacting you can smell it a mile away so you have to develop what hemingway called the detector where you can know when you're writing an authentic sentence this doesn't mean it's true it could be a lie that's not the issue the issue is are you writing are you acting true look if if i'm gonna be hannibal lecter i don't need people's flesh but i gotta act like i do so it isn't about what the story is about it's about my ability as an actor to look real whether i'm talking about eating flesh or talking about eating a rib eye steak i still got to be talking and performing like what i'm doing is true so when i write something that's a lie i still got to write it in in my natural voice and if i don't i should know how to do that and do it on purpose but that's writing it's very hard for people to talk like in poetic form or it's very hard we're not we're not trained that way uh gore vidal and maybe william buckley could do it you know they could uh pontificate uh the american economy such as it was labeled during the time of lincoln when uh unbeknownst to both of them the forces of capitalism had somehow merged with socialism had therefore even though uh people were not aware of it cattle catapulized itself in such a way that the proclivities of those who traded in the market have scunded with whatever kinds of um dough we might say that they could lay their hands on if you know what i mean see that's william buckley nobody talks that way that's buckley or gorby dahl they know how to speak like that if i'm a defense lawyer in front of a jury i'm going to talk naturally i'm not going to talk like a professor of english but if i had to talk that unnaturally i probably would write it and memorize it because it wouldn't come naturally to me unless as a defense attorney i did it a lot ladies and gentlemen of the jury on a wind-swept night when my client unbeknownst to the proclivities of his own heart trampled across the snow covered lawn of the murdered victim he didn't know realize or even perceive that life thread moved stretched to the very end of its core had somehow in the being and nothingness of time caused him to freeze and be unable to pick up the ax frozen standard held up against the light of the sun and smash it against the victim's head no ladies and gentlemen of the jury he did not have the intestinal fortitude to advance step by inch and step by foot into the den of the victim's own criminal activities see that's not how you talk that's a lot of but it doesn't have to be true or a lie that's separate from how i say it how i write it you either write the way a person talks or you write in a literary style and you have to know the difference between the two and you have to know when to do one and when to do the other just like a good actor sometimes knows when to act sometimes you have to act you're being natural and then all of a sudden you take a line you go i'm gonna do this like shakespeare now have you ever seen the movie um i think it's called network do you know do you know the scene do you know the scene where um it's in the newsroom he brings him into that room uh mr beale and he tells him that what he's doing he can't do anymore because he's really upsetting the whole business structure of of television and money and all that stuff so they go into that room where there's a long table and there's those green lights that they use in board rooms and he brings them in and he sits him down at one end of the ring and then he goes to the other end and then the lines he has is mr beale you have tampered with the forces of nature okay now ed beatty a decision i'm going to say this line like you might say it in shakespeare not the way a person would talk now the line is written as it's written but an actor has to interpret it that's different from a writer writing something in a forced literary way so here's an actor who's being natural and then suddenly he becomes very uh shakespearean now i will do the scene for you uh he says um uh mr beal um i haven't seen do you would you like a glass of water uh okay i just just couple things i want to go over with you you walk through uh mr beale you have tampered with the forces of nature you see mr beal the economy is a small thing that does that and when you tell people to see so he switched from talking in a natural voice to a kind of a shakespearean big kind of thing well writers can do that too they can be writing in a natural sentence structure and then they can shift into something poetic and it might only be for one sentence because they want to kind of give something extra to the moment and they know how to do that so the acting analogy i gave you it's an acting analogy the writing analysis would be speaking in a normal way and then all of a sudden you're getting very poetic and then writing it that way and you have to know the difference you know and as hemingway said you have a built-in detector that can tell when you're doing it inadvertently if you do it you want to do it on purpose and you want to know how to write in that fancy style and you want to know how to write in a very simple way when faultsteph in henry iv part 2 sees prince hal who's now the king and when king henry iv was just the prince and he hung out with falstaff who's a rogue and a thief and a big buffoonish comic character once he becomes king falstaff is so excited he tells all his minions now that he's king he's going to call me into the castle and i'm going to have a job and i'm going to make a lot of money and and false if he's thinking how he's going to be able to steal money and all that sort of stuff and then the scene comes where the coronation comes and hal is walking down you know with the the coronation and falstaff is in the crowd and he rushes out and he says how my boy my prince and he was expecting hal to look at him and say falstaff come you know the whole thing but hal is now king and how as king henry iv must renounce everything that falstaff stood for to be a good king that's what shakespeare was writing about what what does it take to be a good king you've got to be a man of the people but you also have to know how to be a king so falseth says and falstaff is the richest probably the most loved character in all of shakespeare because he's funny and he's very human and we see how he's full of so we we love him yeah great actors play falstaff uh he goes prince my boy and he opens his arms and hal looks at him and he says i know thee not old man fall to thy knees presume not that i am the thing that i was that is pretty powerful and except for the the it's writing like you talk you talk about shakespeare i know thee not old man presume not i am the thing i was fall to your knees it's writing like you talk and shakespeare knows how to write like you talk and he also knows how to write poetically and if you go through shakespeare's plays you can see the differences and the changes even with absence of field when king lear is on the heath going mad blow winds crack your cheeks you know he goes crazy some of that speech is nonsense it makes no sense because king lear is losing his mind he's going crazy and shakespeare uses a little bit of absence of feel there so all these techniques are used by writers but if you didn't know to look for them you wouldn't notice them but if you know what you're looking for you will notice them even straight talk when would you say all of a sudden well anyway we do that when we talk all the time yeah yeah you know when i was 19 my father died and i had to come home and we had to bury him anyway so how have you been what's what's going on i mean hey tell me a little bit of something about your life you know i haven't seen you in 20 years we we do that in life we can be deep and authentic and then all of a sudden we start talking with that jibber jab away well to be a not to be that is a question whether it's just nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune or to take arms against your sea of troubles and by opposing in them to die to sleep perchance the dream hi there's the rub that's straight talk all right there ah there's there's the trick you know you start doing that and the next thing you know you're riding your ass that's basically what shakespeare does here all right there's the rub and why does he do it he does it because he knows that if you don't have changes of tone it gets boring boring so to die to sleep perchance the dream all right there's the rub for in the sleep of death what dreams may come when we have shuffled off this mortal coil must give us pause cause there's the rub and then he starts getting deep again and he starts getting deep again and he does straight talk a little bit later on when he figures out uh you know how he's going to get the king so shakespeare does that all the time little switches he goes from writing like you talk to the deep well the the the lost world voice that fancy voice man he can do poetic stuff like like he was born doing that and he will go to straight talk and sometimes even absence of field when he's got a character who's just spouting out nonsense for because they're going mad or because they are a con man you know maybe they're a con man and they're kind of flummoxing you with uh jibber-jabber shakespeare does all that and he knows he's doing it go ahead thank you guys we'll just wait my glasses yeah and then here's a good joke i'll show you you ready uh-huh oh excuse me oops i do that i'm doing that for my students because they do that in class all the time you know i'll be going well um you know look excuse me see that's tonal dynamics too you know when when when you're pontificating sometimes you gotta know when to change the tone or else people get bored sometimes i do it too late they're already bored but you know you you want to change the tone a little bit comic relief yeah and a defense attorney to a jury would a good one would know to do that what is a writer's deep voice and is there more than one inside of a writer at any time you're talking about characters right deep voice well there's only one deep voice there's only one okay yes a deep voice now i could be the deep voice of one character i could be the voice of another and there might be a difference in the character and how it would manifest but the deep voice means you're coming from the deep gut you're not you know you're you're connected but we're not this isn't deep throat in in in calling in a tip to woodward and bernstein this is a real person inside this is this is who you are what you really feel this isn't you pontificating i'm confused i'm sorry i don't know what deep voice means um it's talking in a way in which you're not entertaining anymore you're you're just coming from what you feel in a deep deep way and you're not trying to be a writer you're not trying to perform you're you're just connected when you're not in a deep voice you're telling a story and you're entertaining it was a cold night and a man walked out you know you're trying to entertain people but when you're in the deep voice you are connected in a true way to an emotion you're connected to an emotion so you're not just telling the story like a storyteller you're connected to an emotion now you may not do that for the whole story because there are parts of the story that might have to be a tonal dynamic with a little lost world a little straight talk a little written song but when you're in the deep voice it's like that um commercial with uh the guy about uh uh when ef hutton talks everybody listens you know when you hear the deep voice you listen you could be in a crowded restaurant and everybody's talking and then someone at the next table starts to whisper and suddenly your ear catches it you don't know what they're saying but you hear the tone of voice and you go oh this is going to be personal this is going to be deep and emotional this is not just going to be him telling a story about how he spilled water on himself you know it's going to be deep so when you were here in front of us just maybe i don't know 45 minutes ago and you were telling us about the call that you got at 19 that was your deep voice well i was reliving it in a way that it was emotionally coming into me and i wasn't thinking of how do i write this or anything i was just feeling it when you're feeling something very authentically you're in a true place can you fake it sure as a writer as an actor you learn where that comes from and you can go there you can do it technically it's a it's a technical thing coming from an emotion is technical if you can do it where you really feel the emotion that's better better because then you don't have to act but if you're a good actor you can find a way to feel the emotion and then you're there some actors have to have a different memory to help them do that when in apocalypse now when martin sheen was doing something in the film he imagined the death of his own father that would make him get very emotional it wasn't in the scene but that's what he played inside his imagination which allowed him to get an authentic feeling it wasn't the same as in the film but you didn't know that you don't know what the actor's thinking they once asked clark cable when you tell a woman you love her in a movie how do you say that with so much feeling and he said well i just imagine they're a big porterhouse steak so an actor will maybe find an emotional memory to help them get that memory other actors know how to technically do it just to connect to their deep voice and the same is in writing when you're writing you you should know when you're writing from your deep voice and when you're just telling a story and he had a heart attack on the set of apocalypse now didn't he uh who didn't she have a a heart attack yeah so i mean he's still alive oh yes he's thriving yeah yeah he's on shows and other films but but i wonder i don't know what the circumstances were but if he was imagining that death of his own father how how how maybe maybe it was so real it was so authentic i don't know sometimes actors do feel something that's so real um you know they find a way to personalize it if they need to sometimes you don't have to because you're acting and it's you're believing what you're doing but sometimes you you can't so you you're really thinking something else in your mind to get the emotion out uh well sometimes an actor will do something that's so heavy that when the director says cut they're still in that emotion so i'm not disputing whether he had a heart attack or not maybe he did i guess acting can be dangerous you got to be careful don't play any parts that might cause you to have a heart attack i think i'll just play peter pan well that would have its own you might have to be too too up and happy and then yeah you're right you see so that i don't know if that would be safe art is art is fraught there's an interesting rhyme art and fraud art is fraught with danger i like that yeah you should yeah that's your next book let's see first there's there's dante abandon hope all ye who enter that be one the second would be call me ishmael and the third would be art is fraught with danger jack greeks it's good to remember you know all of us who are writers or actors or filmmakers or whatever we should write that and put it you know in our room to remind us art is fraught with danger it'd be good good thing to remember is that a personal mission statement no i just said it and i said it and i thought oh that's fun should a writer have their own personal mission statement um you mean if we asked writers if they had a mission statement would they have one maybe it's not even in full if fully fleshed out there's just something in them they know their own abilities yeah they probably do i don't have to make one up because i i know what socrates said and that to me is good enough he said know thyself and then he said the unexamined life is not worth living so those are two pretty good mission statements wouldn't you say the unexamined life is not worth living and know thyself know thyself do people still live an unexamined life in this day and age well we all to some extent i mean if i examined my life totally i'd be writhing on the floor in agony but you know i think you can uh you know i've i've been in therapy i think a lot of people have had therapy or they've read books on spirituality or uh whatever you know gone on retreats and meditations and whatnot and i'm sure people have examined their life to some extent of course i think you said though that good art is not about um and forgive me uh it was it was something you said about good art is not about you know kind of like getting all your issues out it's also about making the viewer feel something and forgive me i i'm no it's that's true you you you know you're building a chair so people can sit in it i mean i can be as creative as i want about making a chair uh i know my wife got a chair the other day that she really liked and and we sat in it you know she looked great she loved the way it looked and said i'm going to put that in my office and blah blah blah and one day i sat and i went boy this chair is really uncomfortable so the artist on some level they're making something that they hope will touch or astound or shock uh the the viewer i mean on one level you're doing it for yourself you're you're exploring your own technical materials if you're a painter if you're a writer you're a sculptor a good friend of mine who's a poet in a sculptures she began experimenting with cardboard and made the most amazing things but a lot of times she's just exploring the materials what if i do this with the cardboard and i bend it this way and i glue it this way you you're experimenting with the material same with the writer and other times perhaps you do care about what the viewer will think or get from it if you write a story or a poem or something you're you're saying okay uh what i wrote you know i'm it came out of me but it could be clearer uh i'm i don't think my reader's gonna get it a hundred percent so what do i need to add or cut to make it work better because a piece of writing works it's a piece of writing it's like a machine it works you know you get a machine from the hardware store and you plug it in and it doesn't work you take it back it might look good all the parts are put together the right way but something's wrong it's not working and that you bring they go oh there's a washer here that needs to be put here ah well same thing with a piece of writing or a poem i'll go oh that image there is not clear if the image is not clear then there's no payoff at the end but so i've got to make that image clear and then the reader will get it when i get to the end so you're you're trying to figure out whether it's a novel or a story or a poem or play or screenplay whatever is it working here in this spot so when you edit you're not always just correcting grammar and punctuation you're you're thinking of it as a device that has to do something to the viewer or the reader so hmm something's not working here what is it what do i have to do do i have to cut something add something maybe move this over here oh sometime when someone reads a poem in my class i will say to them read it backwards not word for word but line for line and it works better backwards because when we write we either i mean it can work either way we go from an idea to something specific or we start with some something specific and as we develop the poem we come into possession of a big idea and sometimes it works better when you go from the idea to the specific and sometimes it works better when you go from the specific to an idea so someone will read something to me and i'll go oh okay they they started with an idea and then they got specific if they flip it then the reader will get the specific first and then as the poet comes into possession of the idea it will make more sense well that's a kind of uh simplified version of that but when you're writing you you you're thinking does this work it's it's a machine it's a it's a it's an object you know you put a quarter in and it should do it what it's supposed to do and when it doesn't you fiddle with it you think of how do i make this work better and um you know there's an old saying writing is rewriting so first drafts are usually that's all their first drafts i've never written anything that didn't go through more than one draft i in other words i've never written anything that was perfect the first time out now you're supposed to ask me why well okay i was actually thinking about you said the scene the ending scene of saving private ryan was very emotional too yeah so do you think that that scene meant different things to different people well you you can't know how something is going to affect someone uh people can be affected by something a hundred different ways all you can do as an artist or a writer is to make a good guess and say in order for this scene to work the line has to be different or i need to put the line over here or i need to cut the line and say it this way you can only guess you can only imagine you know and and ultimately you are satisfying yourself you're saying this works for me so hopefully it'll work for others now with the first draft you'd said something previously i said that i've never written uh a perfect first draft well there was also something you said in another and you were supposed to say okay but that's not what i'm actually going to say though so what i'm going to say is but i will give you the answer if you don't ask the question how about i ask the question afterwards you can ask it at any time let me ask the question about genius you had talked about genius i know what you're referring to oh you do okay yeah what is it i talk about the accidents of genius yes thank you right um everyone has genius in them they just don't know what it is what they do know is their talent and your talent will never produce anything great it will only produce something that's good your genius is what is capable of creating something great but because we rely on our talent we often never get to our genius because talent is the obstacle to genius it's when you don't know what you're doing sometime it's when you are falling and you are you're just at the mercy of the gods that your genius wakes up and says this looks like a job for genius man and genius comes through and you do something and it's amazing and what do you think of the two things someone says when whether it's a painting or a story or a poem or whatever when they get something that's utterly amazing what do you think of the two things they say to themselves it's crap they they know it's great oh i see them what do you think they say to themselves i'm a genius i'm amazing no that's not what they say okay have you ever had that experience where you did something and you go oh i thought just a minute ago yeah yeah okay what do you what do you say to yourself i thought i was going to ask a brilliant question and then i realized that it wasn't no you asked a different question sure i wanted you to ask the question why okay that's all i mean i've done things where i thought it was amazing and it and it didn't get that reception and then vice versa but when you knew it was amazing what was the first thing you said to yourself uh that it's powerful yeah but okay i mean you know i'm sorry my in my elementary world i'm gonna say it i'm gonna say it and you're gonna go oh of course you're right okay you write something or you do something as an actor maybe in the middle of a scene and afterwards you go oh my god that was amazing and then you say to yourself where did that come from oh okay yes because you don't know where it came from correct all the other stuff you did you know it came from your talent you know that you know how to do that stuff but this thing you go where did that come from then what's the next thing you ask yourself how can i do that again exactly oh yeah i gotta write how how can i do that again right and the point is there is no formula for that otherwise people would be accessing their genius constantly but they're not they're they usually depending on their talent which is uh understandable that's okay but talent will only get what's good genius will get what's great but your talent is your biggest obstacle and when you let go of your talent sometime and are willing to fail because you have no idea what you're doing sometimes your genius comes to the rescue and when it does you do something and it shocks you and your first thought is how did i do that and your second thought is how can i do it again because you want to do it again but you can't make it happen you can only be receptive to it happening you can only be available for it happening and how do you make yourself available and receptive by getting rid of your talent and if you think that's easy you have another thought coming because you and your talent are in cahoots you say to your talent make me look good and i'll keep you on the payroll and your talent says keep me on the payroll and i'll make you look good so the two of you got a deal going here you're both gonna make the artist look good but that's not what you want what you want is something great and it's always unexpected and it's always an accident of your genius and the accident happens when you're falling off a cliff and all of a sudden you fly you wouldn't fly if you were on on earth you can't make it happen but you're falling you're in the unknown you don't know what to do and you've got to do something because the moment is presenting itself and when it does you write something or you do something with your paintbrush or something or sculpting you put this here and you go how did i do that how can i do it again so that's the the relationship between genius and talent and guess what i went to a chinese restaurant one night and i got a fortune cookie cracked it open and you know what it said i've kept it all these years it said talent does what it can genius does what it must i like that and i want that's it talent does what it can it's limited it does what it can but genius does what it has to do because you're in trouble you're falling off a cliff you've come to a point in your art where you have no idea what to do next and you blunder into something and you go where'd that come from how do i do that again and is that where people get themselves in trouble is they think that they can duplicate that over and over again well i don't know what you know gets themselves in trouble i mean look yeah the whole idea of creating art is to get yourself in trouble as much as you can but and in acting too my my acting teacher always used to say put yourself in danger he said that not not not get yourself in trouble he said put yourself in danger what he meant was be in a place where your character is in danger and things will happen um you know none of us want to be in trouble we do the best we can and we will rely on our talent the more talented you are the more you will rely on your talent the less talented you are the more likely you are to have creative accidents because you have nothing to rely on you have no idea what the hell you're doing and sometimes you know the amateur you know wins at poker the first night because they you don't know what you're doing so that can happen but if you're going to do it long enough at some point you can't say i'm an amateur anymore you have to say look i know what i'm doing i have some talent i know i'm going to rely on it sometime but if i can once in a while get rid of my talent my hopefully my hopefully because if your genius came up every time you got rid of your talent then it would be simple it's the accidents of your genius and when it doesn't come up what happens you you create i'm a failure uh not i'm a failure i've this failed right now and that's how i get better by failing my attitude toward failure is this doesn't define who i am just because i drop the ball when i'm juggling doesn't mean i'm not a good juggle i can i can be a good juggler i just have to keep doing it so how i interpret the failure is different from the willingness to have that happen when you take a risk and most of the time when you take a risk genius doesn't come see that's that's the point it's an accident of your genius it doesn't always come but are you willing to lose a few times to get something great because when they give you the nobel prize karen they are not going to take it away because someone went back to your home and rooted through your trash can and found that you wrote 100 poems that were they're not going to take it away that's what every artist does they write they write crap they fail it happens all the time they're willing to take chances so no one's going to take it away from you when you win the nobel prize but you got to be willing to fail and when you do it may not end up being great but you got to keep at it because when you're willing to face that unknown when you put yourself in danger and not knowing where you're going and you risk failure sometimes sometimes the accident of your genius comes up it's like a mushroom shaped cloud [Laughter] so anyway i you know i've said this to my students and they're always surprised because everyone has this notion that sometimes you just write something and it's perfect as soon as you write it it happens everyone assumes that happens that everybody gets lucky sometime and i said to them i have never written something in a first draft that was perfect that never had to have any changes and what do they say to that no you will say why is that oh that's right okay sorry whose line is it um why do they say that no why is that oh sorry okay let me try that again why is that this is funny this is a j this is a funny joke uh the way you okay um let me try sorry let's why is that well wait no listen a little digression here okay so you're going to interview me okay okay yeah and uh make sure you speak loud so they can hear you sure you have to say i understand you're the world's greatest comedian okay uh mr grapes i understand that you are the world's greatest comedian and i say yes then you say to what do you attribute your great success let me hear it to what do you do sorry you're going to say yes or no to what do you attribute right but you're going to say right yeah yes okay to what do you attribute your great success good let's just rehearse that one let's do it and then we'll do it for the camera okay okay all right uh start okay you are the world's greatest comedian mr graves no it's i understand oh okay you got to get the lines exactly right sure mr grapes mr grapes thank you for taking my question uh karen with film courage i understand you are the world's greatest comedian yes okay to to what do you attribute that successor no to what do you attribute your great success okay to what do you to what do you attribute your great success sir great are you are you ready to shoot it oh i thought we already were no we we were rehearsing right now okay okay sorry no i mean i know he's running it but right right okay this is the joke okay sure sure so have you got it down have you got your line yeah i think so i think so okay okay um mr graves thank you for taking my question karen with film courage i understand you're the world's greatest comedian yes to what do you timing okay there you go you get it i do yeah okay so um um i'm gonna say i've never written a first draft that was perfect and you're gonna say why okay and then i'll give you the answer sure that i give my students okay i've never written a first draft that was perfect why because i'm too good for that okay now what does that mean oh many that's the thing because they're not expecting that they think that if you write a first draft it means you're good and i said i never get a perfect first draft because i'm too good for that that flips it on its head they're going too good you mean if you're too good all your first drafts are not good i would think that if you're good your first some of your first drafts might be really good but you're saying i'm too good to have a perfect first draft why do you think that would be oh um modesty nope i just said i'm too good for that okay um delusion what delusion the the what delusion delusional no no i i i wrote it and i go this is not perfect and i've never had a perfect first drive i see um i don't know because i can see where it can be improved and the person who's not that good doesn't see where it can be improved but i'm good i'm too good to have a perfect first draft because i can see where it can be better that's half the answer the other half of the answer is and i know how to make it better because sometimes you can go um this first draft it's not quite perfect i know it needs to be fixed but i don't know how what i'm saying is i'm too good for that because one i can always see how anything can be made better and two i know how to do it so that dispels that notion that a lot of people have that if you really know what you're doing you should be able to write that first draft and it's perfect and i'm saying well no because if you're really good you will always see how something can be made better and you have the tools and the knowledge to make it better you know how to do it so again that to me is a little paradox which i kind of like because hopefully what i'm saying to my students is don't don't think that the first draft of anything you write is going to be perfect because if you are really good you will see that it can be better and if you know how to make it better that's that's that's that's what you want you want to be able to go hmm this thing is not perfect but if i do this this this and this it'll be perfect and so at what point does someone know where the weaknesses are at what point do they know where the weaknesses are or at what point do they get to where they go well it's not perfect but i'm done the latter there's a famous saying that poets never finish writing a poem they only abandon it that at some point you might still feel well it's not perfect but enough is enough i got to move on to my next one you know so maybe there's always going to be a point where you think well this is as good as i can make it and you you go on i mean i don't think you can say to someone uh there's a point where you will always know where you can make it better and i mean you know we're human beings sometimes what we send out is imperfect and sometimes we got to go well that's enough you know i got to move on to the next thing this is not the best soup i ever made but it'll do what is a transformational line it's a sentence with eye in it that you then massage to go deeper can we have an example yeah say something with i in it okay um i've been really thinking about my life okay so about my life is what we call the birthday cake get rid of that okay so now you're left with i've been really thinking okay okay now what's the deeper truth what's the the answer to the question what is the story of my life and what is the truth of who i am the answer to that is i've been really thinking okay so have you grocked that what is the story of your life and what is the truth of who you are i've been really thinking sure have you have you got that i've been really thinking okay now don't forget there's another concept see there's a lot of stuff that goes to demonstrate this it's called the other side of the same coin and the other side of the same coin is not the opposite it's the same thing said from the other end so if i say i'm always late for work the other side of the coin would be i'm never early if i say i take my time when i go to work the other side of the coin would be well i never take my time when i go to work the other side of the coin would be i always give i never take i always give same thing from the other side so what is the other side of the coin to i've been really thinking what's the other side of the same coin i don't know well let's look at the word thinking what does thinking imply that you're not doing i've been examining things what i've been examining things no that's the same idea okay what does it imply that you're not doing if you're always thinking what are you not doing i'm not living i'm not living so um i've been thinking about something in my life get rid of something about my life that's birthday cake i've been really thinking other side of the coin is i've not been really living okay okay okay so say those two lines i've not been really living no i've i've been really thinking i've not been really living i've been really thinking i've not been really living and what's the deeper truth underneath that karen trying to think the deeper truth that you've not been living there's a deeper truth well we've been in a pandemic what we've been in a pandemic now you're talking about something specific okay and you're not giving me an eye it's got to be an eye statement i've been dealing with the pandemic every day for the last year so the fact that you've not been living the deeper truth is not that it's a pandemic it's about you what's the deeper truth that you are not really living i haven't been going out anywhere okay i haven't been going out that's good i'll take that okay movie theaters but don't think about the pandemic because then then you're getting back to birthday cakes okay okay i don't want you to do birthday cakes it's the story of my life and the truth of who i am not about a pandemic it's the truth of who you are the truth of who you are is i've been really thinking i've not been really living right what's the deeper truth i'm confused i'm confused what's the deeper truth to the fact that karen is confused i found out some information that my life wasn't what i had been told it was say that again without i found that information i was told my life wasn't what it really was now get rid of i told myself and just make the statement my life wasn't what it really was good what's the deeper truth to that then who was i don't ask a question okay it's gotta be i make a statement i didn't i'm not who i thought i was i'm not who i thought i was deeper truth i'm confused that was earlier we're going deeper well um i'm confused i'm not really who i thought i was what's the deeper truth how do we really know who we are i don't i don't ask a question oh i don't know who i really am now and the deeper truth to that you don't know who you really are good that's where i'm stuck i'm stuck i'm stuck okay and one more what's the deeper truth to that you are stuck in your life and the truth of who you are is you are stuck it's the deeper truth that was it okay there you are overwhelmed no no just who okay you were you were down here right right well you went that was right here okay that is where you are now can you hold on to that and write your story in other words you massage the transformation line which is an i statement you take it deeper deeper deeper deeper as the answer to the question what is the story of my life and the truth of who i am and you get rid of the end of the sentence because we're not talking about the the rest of the sentence when you got to i am stuck and then i said what's the deeper truth you felt it before you said it and that's why you went whoo because now you were down there i you didn't even have to say the words you got there now can you hold on to that and from that place of who feel it start to tell a story any story doesn't matter if you start to tell the story from that place karen your writing will be will change okay so what story pops into your head about you being stuck um you want the exact information just some information that i wasn't told about my past my upbringing tell me about it right you know write it you're writing it i'm right don't you just now when you went well you went up stay down with who yeah stay down there it's still pretty fresh i found out about it accidentally uh wasn't really probably supposed to find out and i found out and it made me you're you're you're telling me okay i'm chatting for you when did it happen who uh i wanna know when did that who happened up maybe two months ago tell me tell me about it uh just found out some information that was shocking and really didn't know anymore hi i didn't know who i was after i found that out keep going and uh i was angry that i wasn't told the truth what was the truth you were told probably don't want to say it because it involves family and they could be listening put yourself in danger well i had to confront someone yeah i had to confront somebody for covering things up and not keep being truthful okay this is what people want will buy this is what people will pay for they want that story and they want the scene they want to know what the person looked like they want to know what the dialogue was they want to know where you were what was the lighting light what you know what did the were there sounds make a movie of that scene and and as gert just said be brave be bold and mighty forces will come to your aid so when you massage your transformation line and you keep going deeper and deeper you're going to get to that sentence where you're going to go and then you start writing in that voice don't go up to the chit-chat voice stay in that deep voice and write about it who was it where were you what was happening etc now i know you don't want to go into it here but that is what you would do as a writer and that's what people pay for they don't care your smartness that's not important they want the guts because that's what they want that's what they pay for so you want them to buy your book and look you look at all the books that are best sellers that people have cherished is because characters have been in trouble characters have had a conflict characters had to discover things about themselves that they didn't want to look at something happened they you know it that's what makes drama that's what makes literature clever tales are not going to sell but the deep truth of your life will register with everybody because everyone will go yeah that happened to me too not exactly that way but sort of hey joe you got to read this brenda you got to read this book you got to read this book you got to read this book because it suddenly becomes about human beings who are in conflict and sometimes it has a happy ending where the character triumphs learns to deal with it and somehow it has a tragic ending where the character is unable to deal with it right you're feeling it right now aren't you yeah if you can write from that place karen you will make art do you understand that yeah about a transformation line now if you can get to that deep place without the transformation line great that's just a technique i came up with but if you but if you stumble onto an i statement about a birthday cake when my brother came home i was hiding the birthday cake you get rid of the birthday cake and now you got i was hiding what is this truth what is the story of your life and the truth of who you are i was hiding not about a birthday cake i was hiding in my life and then you massage it and it takes you deeper look how it brought you deeper we should have the camera on you right now glad i don't have mascara your eyes are fillet full of tears and your heart is your heart is in your throat yeah now right from that place don't go up stay there and write and the writing write like you talk don't try to be a writer just tell the story and it will be magic and you practice it that's what i teach people practice it and at the end of the first class of the first seven classes that becomes an important tool for them what do you think yeah maybe give it more time before you worry about if it's something that's now i've got a line for you to say to me okay say that felt like therapy that felt like therapy but it's not therapy it's about how to write something that people will buy if you tell your therapist the story that you're not able to tell now but that you would and you would tell it to your therapist the therapist isn't going to go hmm you know if you start with the image of when you got in the car with your father and then do the part with the mother it'll be a lot better that's not what therapy is about my class is about making art right writing something good so you might read what you wrote and i would say wow that was amazing but you know the part about the father why don't you open with that and then go to the thing about the mother see because we are dealing with this as a work of art i'm not responding to you like a therapist i'm not a therapist i'm not here to get you to you know go through your feeling about being stuck i'm here to use that as a conduit to get you to write in the deep voice because that voice is powerful and when the reader hears it when e f hutton talks everybody listens that deep voice you could be on the beach on a sunny afternoon and you're reading a novel about a man in a prison wearing an iron mask the story will transport you the reader to some place completely different and every novel every story every poem does that it's intimate it connects to the reader you are talking to the reader and nobody else the reader feels like this is just for me in a way you don't say it literally but you say to the reader look i have to tell you about something that happened to me i thought i was fine but then i realized and i got stuck and my life has not moved at all now there are some things i'm going to tell you that i'm not going to tell anybody else i'm only telling you in this book and some of the people in this story they don't know about it but you will know about it dear reader because you and i have this bond and i'm speaking only to you that's the illusion you create with art so yeah getting to the deep voice might make you feel emotionally uh concerned but that's what it is to be an artist an artist doesn't just create with the mind the artist creates with their soul with their being and you have to that's what you have to suffer they don't care if the dancers heels are bleeding they just want the dancer to jump up in the air and stay there for a long time and then come down they don't care if it was hard for them to do it they paid 150 for these seats that's what they want to see and that's what your reader wants from you they want blood and you give it to him you give it to him and then your book becomes a best seller and you buy an island in the pacific and retire do you see what i'm what the point is i'm making here you know because your stories are universal they're everybody's story but you felt the power of it didn't you i did yeah i'm not sure i'm ready to tell it but well in the class you would you'd write it and then in the class you'd read it and you'd be trembling and you'd be you'd feel like you're in danger and then after you finish reading it everybody would be moved and you'll go hmm i survived i i'm okay i told my story but i'm okay and they love the story okay what else i bought this i bought this in an airport oh wow they had one that said playwright which i have here they had another one that said arthur and i bought that one i don't know where it is and there was another one that said dog catcher and if i could find it i'd wear it but i can't find that one either so play writer yeah play right yeah i think playwright's way better than a dog well i don't know you know uh we we actually uh had a very stressful day yesterday because in the middle of the night someone deposited a dog in our front yard and we have a little wall about that high that the puppy wasn't a little puppy it was you know but a puppy it'll be a bigger dog they just dumped and at six o'clock in the morning my wife went to get the paper and she said i need your help we got this puppy he's been moaning and groaning and he's scared and all the whole thing and so we took it in and we fed it and we were debating did we keep it because we have a german shepherd and the two of them weren't the german shepherd didn't wasn't crazy about it the german shepherd's name is penelope and so we named the dog homer and by the end of the day we were exhausted we realized the the dog's not house broken we don't have time to walk it along with the other dog it was a mess so we finally decided we're going to have to find someone who will adopt the dog but we love the dog so much within that one day we both bonded that where are we going to find someone who's going to take good care of it that's tough yep and she went to the pet store where we bring our dog and the trainer there he saw a picture we took a picture of the dog he looked at me went that's an australian cattle dog they're very expensive and my wife said would you like it would you like to take it because we can't handle it he said i've been looking for an australian cattle dog that you know i i've been looking for it he was so thrilled and he's he's a trainer and he and his wife came over last night and they bonded and the dog is okay but at the end of the day i said to my i'm wiped out yeah we've had that's how we had a cat for like 16 17 years just showed up at the door stressed crying and probably someone dumped it and um i know yeah our first cat was like that yeah she was under a house scared to death you know and that cat cleo when she she died um she had been attacked by a dog and we brought her to the vet and her wounds were pretty bad and the vet said i'm afraid she's probably not going to live very long and he said you want to leave her here with us and i said no no we're going to take her home and she will if she passes away it'll be here in our house so we took her home and he said but you know if she is going to survive you have to give this eye dropper in her mouth every hour so i laid on the floor next to her and every hour i didn't sleep that night every hour i gave her a little bit of this medicine and at some point and then i would fall asleep and then i'd wake up and give her some more and at one point about four in the morning i think it was when i went to feel her i could feel the body had rigor mortis had said it's that stiffness she's dead and i just stayed with her and then about 6 30 my wife walked in and she said house cleo and i said she died and i started crying i've never i don't think i've cried that hard since i broke up with somebody when i was a senior in high school i started crying so heavy and then i realized what it was i was crying for my father because i never grieved for my father because it's a long story but i kind of skipped over the grief part and i real and this is like 30 years later here i am crying and i went i'm crying for my father and just man it just came out and uh and you know we put her in a box and we we buried her and so forth or had her berry that kind of thing but boy animals they can really rip your heart out yeah they can and i've rescued a lot of cats or we have and yeah um you know they they appreciate it i don't think i've ever i've only purchased them from rescues i've never purchased a purebred or anything yeah yeah we've always rescued our pets chucky who we had to put up had cancer we had to put her down she used to come up on my he used to come up on my desk when i was working and she would plop right down on my checkbook and rather than move her i would try to write the checks and put them in the envelopes without disturbing uh him oh yeah we know all about it yeah that's our daily right right animals man yeah they're wonderful though okay anyway you have yeah let me um okay um you have a concept you teach called image moment oh it's very complicated okay and it's a cinematic it's a cinematic construct in writing that most people don't do because it's not intuitive something you have to learn to do but it takes a moment in a dramatic scene and how to create psychological time um so that the reader is in that dramatic moment as if it was a movie like when you're in a movie and someone says something and then there's a pause and then say something else and it's like wow one of those great moments you know oh red what will i do where will i go pause frankly my dear i don't give a damn you know so when you're writing it you're not making the movie you're writing it how do you create that pause and that moment of drama um so that the reader feels they're watching the movie and that they're in the movie you know they're watching it you and you create psychological time the psychological time is the pause the pause might only last a second in the movie but psychologically it could last forever so the husband comes home and she says i listen to your messages today you went oh she said are you having an affair pause pause pause uh no so the drama in that pause how do you make that psychological that real time which is only two seconds psychological so that it feels forever well there's a way to now i have a lot of techniques that you do and what you do it's a long it's a long mechanical construct but image moment because you're creating a moment using images and creating psychological time it takes people a while to learn how to master it because most people want to just tell their story and stopping and doing an image moment feels like they're not going with the flow of their story so you have to train people to do that do you think that's what's missing in a lot of let's say first time screenplays or films is that psychological time that pacing it's too fast a screenplay can't create psychological time the filmmaker can create it all you can create in a screenplay is dialogue you can't tell the actors to pause you can write it in the screenplay but it doesn't mean they're going to listen to you uh you you can say cinematic pause here well the director may go no we're going to do it my way so you're not you're not in control all you can control is the dialogue and even then you'll have an actor who will rewrite your line but you can create a cinematic moment in prose where you create what appears to be like a movie and you can learn how to do it and once you learn how to do it uh and get over all your impulses to not do it because it's a technique you really it's a tech just like in movie making you have to know which lens to use and you know when to go in for a close-up and then it goes to the editor's room and then they have to edit it that that's technical that's very technical and the job of the editor who's editing it is to make the scene on the screen not look technical he's got to make it work so you go wow major stross has been shot pause round up the usual suspects the end of casablanca so the editor cuts it in such a way that you as a moviegoer feel the psychological time so the image moment technique i teach is technical it's very technical and when people learn to do it and they finally get it they're always amazed at how it works and then happens without fail they'll say i was reading a book the other day and there were like five image moments on every page because good writers know how to do it but it's not intuitive it's not something you intuitively will know how to do oh i'm sorry i was just trying to put this it's so hard one of the flaws in the design that i never got that's really cool made perfect that's really cool um writing that'll live forever versus writing that's a dead end you've made that comparison with poetry i believe writing you say that again sure writing that'll live forever versus writing that's a dead end versus writing that's a dead end is it is that what is your question that's the question let me try it again so in other words some writing lives forever and some writing doesn't i think you said that about poetry and you said sometimes writers uh attempt to go for writing that'll live forever but really what they're doing is it's a dead end how does a writer know that it doesn't have to be poetry or prose any screenwriting i i don't know if i have a wise answer to that some some sometimes you you don't know um you know some some of the things you do you might think aren't going to be especially uh relevant or memorable and for some reason uh it lives for a long time and other things that you think are the best thing you ever did ends up being forgotten so it's kind of hard to know it's kind of like a crapshoot you do the best work you can and you hope for the best creativity is a process not a prescription for product okay yeah i don't say you know here's the finished product let's work to make the product and a product has this it has that it is this it is that that's what most writing classes do uh matter of fact that's what most literary criticism in the 19th century did and in the 20th century literary criticism even shifted to what what are the techniques or the devices that the author used not what is it his life about and the freudian implications and the social menu of the time but what are the devices that the artist used to make that product well i kind of go further back and go the devices are something that we write in in the process toward product but we don't aim for the finished product we don't know where we're going to go the creative work is about the process working on the concepts the exercises not on a prescription for a finished product so the concepts i teach in method writing are not the end product they are the process impulse so all the concepts i teach not just in level one and two that we kind of talked about but in level three four and five and then the levels beyond i have a whole bunch of levels um it's it's about the process i'm always wanting the artist to honor the process the way you work not what you're aiming for but just let the truth of the impulse of your process find its way and then when you finally get your novel or your story or your poem you won't have headed there and my analogy in sports is in golf you don't aim you don't aim to get the ball in the hole you hit the ball correctly you get the right club and you swing correctly and if you do that it'll go where it's supposed to go but you don't aim to put it in the hole so you you go through your process and let the end result take care of itself so that's what i mean when i say the creativity is about the process matter of fact isn't that the term they use they say the creative process so if you come from the process the product will emerge and it will always surprise you it will be unexpected you didn't expect to be stuck we started out with um uh i'm really thinking about da da da and by the time we got through going through some of the techniques of the other side of the coin and and other things i didn't bring up you end up being stuck and writing about that subject that you didn't expect to write about so that's what i mean by it's not a prescription for product it's so it's a process just make sense it does do you see a lot of writers that come in with the product mindset everybody ever you think everybody starts out sure we're all human we all have you know ideas things we want to do most people have some kind of idea what they want to write about and they're always surprised that in some way they did do it but they took a route they didn't expect and if they had gone straight for it it wouldn't have been what it ended up being and that the you know the unexpected path there was what makes it interesting not where they got why is it important to outline the story before you start writing it it's not important i would never suggest anybody do that that's exactly what i just finished talking about that's where you you're looking at your product and and you know fitting your feet into the shoes of the right size and you're not in any creative process at all i would never tell anybody to outline your story except there's two exceptions you would make an outline of your story if you're being paid and this is the other component because if you're just being paid and this other component isn't there then it doesn't apply you're being paid and there's a deadline tomorrow or at the end of the week well okay they're paying me they want me to write a story about ballistic missiles okay i'll do the best i can with my talent i'll outline what i need to do blah blah blah i'll get it done in a week and i'll make five thousand dollars but if they're not paying me and there's no deadline why would i go with an outline for the product when the creative process is much richer and holds so many unexpected marvels that's what i want to bet on i want to bet on that horse the unexpected marvel that will come from the unknown and the unexpected of the creative process why would i do if no one's paying me and there's no deadline why would i purposely sabotage my genius which doesn't come out all the time anyway if ever i'm not going to make an outline because then i'm bound by the outline so you don't need to know where you're going when you when you're writing a story it's not about needing to know you are better off if you don't know if you know you're probably going to be in trouble it's like love i'm not going to fill that blank tell me i want to hear it if you have a card and every time with your date you keep looking at the card always say something funny okay you know it's it's got a list of things you should do that will make your date want you i mean that's ridiculous you have to be in the moment and you have to just be there be in the moment see what happens love always happens when you don't expect it to happen right yeah that's true that's true so you don't think blind dates work you what you don't think blind dates work if they're kept blind if you are open a matter of fact i'm saying the opposite i'm saying blind aches can work listen to the stories that people tell of how they met you know people who've been together for three four five years at least i'll say you know i never expected that he was my uncle's uh neighbor and it was a wedding and he was there and and he's not anything like the person i thought i would fall in love with i thought it was going to be this this and that and i don't know just something happened and the next thing you know we got five kids you you can't um oh there's a s is it the supreme you can't something about love what is it it's just sorry love can't what you can't hurry love you can't we can't hurt sorry you don't want me to sing yeah no no you don't want me to sing it you i would be happy to hear you okay all right but people we can we can put a link to the video for the song yeah no you know if something is going to be written written it's going to be written don't be afraid yeah you got that story about you when you went fishing with your fight it'll it'll come through don't don't worry about it go with the unknown and it'll come in when you least expect it but go with the unknown that's the creative process unless someone's paying you right and there's a deadline well you know you're not you're not stupid someone's gonna give me money to write about ballistic missiles okay i'll do it but otherwise i'm gonna go with the unknown so what about the people that say you must have a road map for where you're going if not your story will not turn out and i got a uranium mine that you must invest in somewhere out in nevada you give me ten thousand dollars of your hard-earned money and i'll make you a million what would you say to that can i go visit the mine i would say you take me on a door i would shut the door so the same is true for the story you i don't worry about it it'll come through and anyone who says you must know your story you might if you want to put your money in a uranium on that's that's your business but you know it's not what i teach so i'm not saying my way is the only way but it's what i teach what is the invisible motor the idea that a work of art is a mechanical thing um that's an analogy i use but i discovered it goes all the way back to the russian formalists who looked at the form rather than the content in other words not the story but the devices you use to make the story come alive and they felt that a work of art was like a machine and it worked as i said uh and one of the analogies this guy used the man named victor shlovsky he said it was like a car and uh he said some other things but i go slightly slightly different direction uh there's three things with the car there's the engine there's the inner structure and decor and is what the car looks like on the outside what the car looks like on the outside is your story that's your story a lot of people write their stories and there's no engine and there's nothing inside it's like a fake set on a movie you know movies lot that's the outer trappings of it but to me the motor that's under the hood that's the invisible motor that powers a poem or story and when you work on your story or whatever you're going to be writing the techniques that i teach are the mechanics of that invisible motor that powers your story so that's what i mean when i say the invisible motor and most writing classes don't really go to the invisible motor they go with the design of the car the story how it looks on the outside but they don't really get into writing i want to make people better writers not better plotters when you're on a plane and someone says to you what do you do you don't say oh i'm a plotter i want you to be you know the one who makes the story go because of the engine if i got in the car the most beautiful car in the world turn on the key it doesn't work i don't want the car it's got to go what makes the car go the devices that we learn how to write in an authentic voice then learn how to use the other four voices then i have other levels where i teach other devices but these are devices that actually facilitate the creative unknown and what's the oil in that engine what if i'm low on oil and now these gears and these different parts are going to start grinding and pretty soon the car is going to stop working good question no one's ever asked me that what's the oil whether it's synthetic vegetable whatever i'm running on what what is that oil that's keeping this story your emotional truth that's the oil if it's not coming out of here it's not worth it it's just imagination which is good up to a point but it has to have an emotional truth what's the emotional truth so that's the oil okay look at the oil you had a little while ago that's true i mean that was a lot of oil kiddo it was it was an oil spill and if you can hold on to that oil not just for the story you would write about being stuck but other experiences you might write about that that same oil applies now your story is going to be compelling for the reader right you don't need an outline you don't need a plot you don't need that if you don't have the deep voice and you don't have the oil of some of the other techniques the emotional truth you're just you're doing what uh when jack kerouac wrote on the road and he showed it to truman capote it was he wrote it on butcher paper you know rolls a butcher paper which is just stuck in the typewriter uh truman capota said that's not writing that's typing now he was wrong but that's a good analogy and if you don't have the emotional truth it's just typing it's not writing okay but the way you're nodding your head yeah and but i was actually thinking of the movie kill your darlings which i did a show part part of it had jackass i was trying to picture what he was going through i believe he was that his character was in the film so that's where i went to i was thinking of right now um did he go to france and people think he was homeless or am i getting him talking about jack kerouac am i getting him mixed up with someone else where he went to france and he became very disillusioned because people thought he was homeless no no i'm thinking of someone no he lived with his mother okay wrong person all his stories about him being on the road he went on the road a few times he basically lived with his mother and and and typed and timed but he drew on his experiences he was a great writer and he drew on his experiences and boy you read on the road and man that that book is the the poetry in it comes from the emotion of his deep voice just every once in a while i read the last paragraph on the road you just read that last two or three paragraphs the last page man it's great and i just read it and it sometimes helps me find my voice try it sometime what's this do you remember what exactly the paragraph is not word for word but i i can't quote it you'd have to read it if i had it here i could read it but uh um fair enough yeah you know it's a beautiful beautiful piece of writing you know it's like a piece of music sometime i will read a paragraph or a page out of a book that i know the way i would put some music on because i know it somehow gets me in the mood or it touches me in a certain way so same with writing i'll read something and it just i'll read the end of ulysses with molly bloom's speech where you know they're on this bluff and he's been trying to get her to make love to him and finally she thinks oh what the hell as him as anyone else what the hell and then she asked him to ask her again and he asked her and she said yes i said yes i will yes i'll read those last words in ulysses and man it just i hear the rhythm of that voice it just really connects me there's a lot of books things that i'll go and read i'll read the opening of dante's inferno midway through the journey of my life i found myself lost in a dark wood i found myself lost in a dark wood how do you find yourself by getting lost i midway through the journey of my life i found myself now literally it means i i suddenly i was there you know like i found myself at the east uh gate i found myself in the back room you know but if you think of it literally midway through the journey of my life i found myself lost that's how i found myself by being lost in a dark wood you know in the dark truth of your soul and and of being stuck and where you went when you went to the deep voice that's your potent place that's the oil that will make your engine run and if the engine is put together right and you've got these techniques that you know how to use indy 500 winner is that why you love writing poetry the rhythm of the writing the rhythm of the word well the rhythm is the rhythm of the voice i mean that's the rhythm of the the deep voice speaking to someone else in a very intimate way and connecting with him you know um i i talked about my dog jessie who um she had cancer and we had to put her down it's in one of my books i like i like different sizes i like when i'm doing a book i like to think what size do i want it to be like lucky finds with all the cards now most most of my books are going to be you know the normal size of a book but once in a while i i'm curious so like i did a book of haiku oh yeah and i wanted it to be a flip book so i i thought it would be about that thick and it would be 50 haiku but it ended up i wrote 300 haiku and i wrote a introduction that was uh close to 450 pages oh so it's got a 450 page introduction and then it's got 301 haiku and the introduction is what does it say here it says um in 201 chapters and 601 paragraphs so the little book i was going to do ended up being like that and it kind of grew so i i i kind of like different things this book is a smaller book too and um it has a i think of it as a circus the poems are all different and i have a chagall painting in the front and on the back it's got a roomy quote with passion prey with passion make love with passion eat and drink and dance and play why look like a dead fish in the ocean of god rumi so i have a poem in here that is about my dog jesse this is not an earth-shattering poem it's just about my dog jesse who we had to put down jesse my dog i was driving back from a music recital this evening and found myself cruising down a street i used to frequent 30 years ago but haven't driven down since so many of the places i used to go to are gone a favorite italian restaurant now a fitness center a bookstore now an antique store a cafe where i read most of 100 years of solitude now an ice cream parlor it isn't as if i was planning to go to any of those places but it makes me sad to know they're gone it doesn't really matter i'm 72 years old a lot is gone it's all gonna go eventually by the cafe a boy was walking his dog along the sidewalk one day the boy will be gone along with his dog my dog is gone jesse used to lie by my feet as i sat at the computer trying to write a poem she's gone now no more jessie after i'd written the poem i'd take jessie out for her midnight walk sometimes we'd pass a house and the people inside might still be up sitting at the table talking and drinking but mostly the streets were quiet and she and i would enjoy the night air the way the leaves rustled when a wind came up from the ocean maybe a poem would be buried in someone's front yard and jesse would dig it up and bring it to me like a bone she just found that poem about the man in charge of watering jesse dug that one up she just dug it up and brought it to me what you got there girl she dropped it on the sidewalk then trotted off looking for more poems more bones no more bones now and few poems to be dug up except this one which is torn at the edges and i've stopped caring about the line breaks or the metaphors or even the kind of things a poet is supposed to do when writing a poem making everything ship shape no more bones no more ship shape i'm not even sure you are reading this poem right now maybe no one is reading it like i said earlier it doesn't matter you know i write the poems anyway jesse will come back some night take my poems on our walk and bury them in someone's front yard and all i'll have to do in my remaining years is walk my weary bones down the sidewalk and dig them up dig up those poems that jesse buried my good girl talk taking such good care of me then and now jessie won't be with me but i'll thank her give her a good rub on the back then i'll let her go see that's about my dog jesse that's beautiful so it's not so much rhythm as the voice you know sometimes there are rhythmic things you can do and that's part of your technique so it depends if i'm doing to be read and sung you know the repetition then i would do that you know it's also about loss and change you know you talked about walking down the street and the this restaurant isn't here anymore and this bookstore has changed well it's about i'm 70 i wrote that when i was 72 i'm 78 now so i wrote that six years ago it's about thinking you know as i said my dad died when he was 54 and i i wasn't i always thought i would live longer than he did so you know when i wrote the poem i was 72 and you know i'm feeling older your bones your body you don't you know i can't dunk anymore you know i can't throw a football 70 yards and so you also think of what you can't do as an artist that you're getting older and things are going to be gone you're going to lose things friends will die and loved ones will leave and i was just thinking about that and feeling all that uh and that jessie was gone but um i thought of how she would bury my poems and then dig them up which is a metaphor of course [Music] and that eventually had petter and let her go that at some point the poems don't come anymore and the muse that brings you the poems whether it's your dog or the muse or whatever that will end too and you have to let it go you have to give him a pet and let it go whether it's a poem or a lover a loved one friend whatever what do you mean by the muse won't come anymore well the muse you know i don't i don't believe in the muse but and i'm just using that cliche that you know poets sit and write and the muse comes and gives you the poem i don't believe that i believe that you the muse is in you but i just use that cliche as a kind of the idea that you'll be sitting at your desk and nothing will come to you anymore you know the muses will say you know we got to work with this guy in chicago he's just 20 years old he's just starting out uh you know take care of yourself jack so i i i use that cliche that the the muse won't come anymore you you you you won't have it what an athlete can lose it a writer can lose it you never know but can you lose it for a while and get it back i know the the writer's block but is that really that the muse won't come anymore well i look but we're getting into technicalities here i don't believe in writer's block okay i can write a sentence hemingway once said uh when he had writer's block he said he would write this down you've done this before you can do it again all you have to do is write one true sentence he didn't mean true factually he meant a sentence that was authentically spoken and real and not trying to be a writer and not trying to gussy it up just saying the simplest thing you could say you've done this before you can do it again all you have to do is write one true line well i don't have writer's block you know why because here's what i write i got up this morning at seven o'clock i don't feel like writing today i don't have anything to write about it looks like it's gonna rain and later i have to go to ralph's to get a chicken blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah i don't know what i'm going to write about but i don't care i'm just i'm going to write well i don't feel like writing i have nothing to write about i feel like i have writer's block but of course i never have writer's block i don't know what it is a big wooden thing inside my head just write you don't have to have a story you don't have to have an idea just connect with that moment and maybe you'll write crap but you'll write i don't believe in writer's block i don't believe in the muse and inspiration and all of that stuff i believe in the mechanics of art i believe if you know how to hit a a golf ball and you know how to hit shoot a basketball and you practice it a thousand times then even if you're not in the mood you can pick up the damn ball and shoot a hoop i can pick up the damn club and hit the ball maybe i can only hit it 10 feet because my bones are old and i'm tired but i can do it i don't have to have i need to be inspired to play golf today imagine if a professional athlete said i only play when when i'm inspired you know there goes that million dollar contract why do people call themselves blocked writers i don't know i'm not their therapist they're operating under an illusion they're not very professional yeah if i get an injury i don't go and play that day but if i'm not injured i play i don't feel like it but i play because i gotta play according to the schedule so i can get up and write i've done it before i can do it again all i have to do is write one true line i got up this morning at seven o'clock i don't feel like writing today as a matter of fact i have nothing to write about it looks like it's gonna rain and later i gotta go to ralph's to get a chicken blah blah blah blah blah blah blah it's not magic do you think people romanticize being a blocked writer makes them more tragic makes them maybe get some sympathy maybe but if they write about it that would be good there you go see if you're right about it you know i feel blocked today all right write about it i just think you know if you can physically hold the pencil or type at your keyboard you can write something but what happens is when you think of your product and your outline how am i going to get from point a to b in my outline oh where am i going to start and what happens when the door closes and oh god i have writer's block i don't worry about that we don't care about plot we care about the human being in the story yeah the human being is what matters if the reader doesn't care about the human being they could care less about the plot everybody tries to come up with plot i mean plot's important and i could do a whole lecture on the difference between plot and story there is a difference story is the chronological sequence of the events a plot is how you arrange the sequences and sometimes you don't always start at the beginning go to the end sometimes you start at the end and then you go to the beginning and then you go to the middle you know then you have a flashback i mean plot is is is much different than story but when you're writing a story or your plot if the human if the protagonist whether it's first person or third person if the reader doesn't care about that character why would they care about the plot they they care about a character and then they want to see what's going to happen to the character and that's the story so character is most important every writer will tell you that it's almost a cliche grab any writer any published writer off the street and say what's the most important thing and they'll go character now once you've got your character your character will lead you to your story and to your plot even if you've already got it made up and figured out and outlined it characters change their mind characters don't always do what you want them to do they will tell you what they want to do and what they want to say and all of a sudden your character leaves for tierra del fuego and i didn't plan on that but now they're on a ship going to tierra del fuego and they're meeting a tall dark woman with a long cigarette holder and a cigarette that has a long ash whoa where do i go with that you don't know it's accidental so once you've got character then the character will create your plot and where does character come from character comes from the voice if you're in the deep voice and the character is narrating from the deep voice or the third person narrator is in the deep voice that creates compelling character so voice creates character character creates plot and it can be no other way right can't reverse i would never say it can't be any other way what i'm saying is that in general um if your story does not have a character that people relate to your story isn't going to be enough and the way you get people to relate to a character is through the authentic voice they hear that intimate voice and suddenly that character is real and is alive but i'm not gonna say it's the only way it's the way i think it should be because that will succeed for you like i said i don't think there's a writer out there that will tell you character doesn't matter they're going to tell you character matters what are the steps to developing and building a character i actually teach a class in that um well one establishing the voice how does that character talk um how do they see the world what is their attitude toward the world and then you've gotta collect a lot of details that i have my students make a character checklist not for any one character but for any character and you should be keeping this checklist for the rest of your life anytime you see something that looks interesting about a character or you think about it or you see it in a movie or you read it in the book make a note of it and then when you start developing your character riffle through your your checklist and see what you got that's kind of interesting um so you want to find things that make the character compelling because of little little things what do they keep in their refrigerator how do they wear their clothes how do they eat eggs how do they eat sunny-side up eggs so you should be paying attention you know a lot of writers that they don't pay attention they've been to a coffee shop or cafe a hundred times and they've never really looked at how people eat if you look at how people eat everybody eats a particular way the way they hold the fork the way they cut their food sunny side up eggs you should watch 10 different people eat sunny side up eggs and every one of them will do it differently i saw one guy he cut the white put it on the fork dipped it into the yolk okay and eat it and the yolk would come up white yo so he would he kind of kept doing that i saw another guy eat the white without touching the yolk never touched the yolk until all he had was the yolk in the center of the plate and then he took his fork and he slid it under the yolk picked it up and i tell you i get the sh to me there's i couldn't do that gets his fork under the yoke and the whole thing like he'd been waiting the whole meal to get to that yolk now to me yolk creeps me out i've got to mix it up when i was a kid my dad would have to cut it all up for me because i didn't even want to dip it in the i wanted it all cut in little pieces and all mixed together it would be a scrambled sunny-side up egg and i would eat it that way dipping my toast into it uh if you look at people eat their food you'll find a lot so you could do a checklist on hundreds of little things about people what does their refrigerator look like everybody's refrigerator is looks differently and when i go visit a friend or anybody's house even if it's a stranger you know someone says oh let's go over my friend's house or something i look at their refrigerator and i look at their medicine cabinet oh and i look at their books oh interesting i can tell more about a person by their medicine cabinet their refrigerator and the books they have than anything else whatever they are acting like i know i know about them by that now as a writer i'm going to make notes of things i find interesting so that i'll use that in a book for a character you know people who have 10 day old milk in the back or or they have lots of uh tupperware and everything is in there and it's going it's already moldy you know how do people arrange their refrigerator some are are you know obsessive-compulsive they've got everything neat and perfect so same with the medicine cabinet boy cabinet tells you everything oh like you know somebody's got a tube of cream that's been blick and the cream hasn't been used in about a year but they've kept it because who knows that rash may come back and you can see the top the cream that was squished out of the top is now brown and it's you know they didn't even press it neatly or something one guy's got his toothpaste and he rolls it as he goes another person is squishing it here and there and it's a mess so there's all sorts of little eccentricities that you can find in a medicine chest make a note of them and keep it on your checklist because one day you'll be writing a story and you'll have a minor character and you'll have an opportunity to mention something in their medicine chest that will be interesting what about books what does that tell you about well i always look at books see what people are reading you know i mean you never know what people read and and you always you'll find anomalies too you'll you'll find all their books about one subject and then they got one book on aristotle and you go hmm what are they reading aristotle for but then they'll have another book on how to make a million dollars in the stock market or something you know you just oh this person's got one of their books that they must have read in first grade and they've jimmy potts gets a haircut and you open it and it's got little illustrations in it and it's a story about a kid who gets a haircut and the barber made a bad cut and some woman thinks he was hit by a truck it's you know it's a story for like a third grader and he's still got it i wonder why gee i'll use that in a novel one day so you make notes of things that you think are are interesting and you put it on your checklist and you have hundreds of things on your checklist all sorts of things uh just their emotional truth and just their anything and then when you start writing a short story and you got a character you think all right what have i got on my checklist maybe i can use some of this stuff you know the way they clean their glasses the way they wear their glasses um the inside of their car well that's another thing like a medicine chest the inside of the car i mean i knew one guy every time i'd get in his car i'd say why don't you grab a shovel and dust up you know it was that you know it looked like uh what do you call the junkyard or the ones with the serial killer clean where you're like whoa this thing's been get in the car that's absolutely pristine yeah wow a little freaky well i don't know i think i admire this person oh okay they really worked hard i'll have a penny on the mat on the you know not the driver's seat but over there it's been down there for like months and i just don't feel like picking it up and i kind of got used to being it down there i figured i'm not going to pick it up let's see if someone else picks it up and if someone else does pick it up i'll go ah okay character interesting some people won't let sleeping dogs lie and some people won't let lying penny sit so you know you find out little little things that that are interesting um i read a a detective novel a few years ago a few years ago 30 40 years ago and it was about a character who's a main character in all his detective novels who is a detective and a crooked sheriff in a small town in florida throws him in jail for something so he's in jail for like two days and he's just trying to keep his sanity and figure out who did the murder but in order to keep himself occupied he thinks of things and one of the things he thinks about and it's a two-page essay you're not old enough to remember this but when i was a kid and you had skates nowadays skates are attached to shoes you just put your foot in the shoe that's got this the roller skates attached to it but when i was a boy you had the metal skates that had little clamps on it and it hooked your shoes not tennis shoes you had to have shoes that had you know rims on them that you could hook it on and then the way you would tighten it would be with a little thing that looked like a little wrench called the skate key and you always had to have the skate key with you because you never knew when it would change and the skate would fall off and you'd have to unscrew it put it back on your shoe and then screw it again so where did you keep that skate key well 90 of the kids who skated took the skate key there was a little hole in it and they put a string in it and then they would tie the string around their head and this skate key would hang here he wrote two pages on a skate key i don't remember anything about that novel except that essay on a skate key has nothing to do with the story totally irrelevant to the story except it tells you something about his character and it became interesting so little things can be very fascinating in books even a detective novel where i remember that and i've forgotten everything else or latch key kids used to have the the string you know you could always tell in the 80s the latch key kids yeah you know and and the latch key kids would have a string with the key right exactly and they we were told to hide them so that people didn't know that you'd be going home alone right yeah my observations yeah and an extra quarter in your pocket in case you had to call your mom right for a payphone now every kid's got an iphone sure i remember driving around somewhere where i was because i had to call my wife or maybe the person i was living with i had to call him to tell him i was going to be late and you're looking for you know a little pay phone sometime in a movie when that happens i'll think to myself why didn't they just call them on their iphone and i go oh it's 1972. there is no iphone yeah i remember being on the phone trying to call my grandmother letting her know quote everything was okay it was in a little bit of a rough part of town and somebody was making a nefarious deal and yelling about it the paper next to me and i'll never forget he was really angry and i'm thinking and my grandma was like is everything okay oh yeah everything's fine but that's la you know at that time with the pay phones i don't know it could be anywhere but you see what just happened i talked about a skate about stuff in in a medicine chest how you eat eggs a skate key and then you thought about the latch key and then we got into the calling on the phone and you remembered how you had to call your grandmother to say everything's fine and someone is yelling over there doing some kind of drug deal or something it was bad yeah there's a scene from a novel yeah and and which has nothing to do with the story but it it might be the the event that the reader never forgets don't forget your plot sure but they'll not they'll never forget that moment where you're on the phone trying to tell your grandmother you're fine and there's a drug deal going on there and somebody's yelling and screaming and you're not exactly in the best part of town right because a phone is a phone yeah oh yeah you found the phone go make the call they used to have three in a row you know you'd go and then this person came after i already got on the call and right i'll bet you a hundred dollars that if i give a young person today a a quarter and say there's a pay phone i want you to make a call on the pay phone okay they put the quarter in then the dial the number hi hey bill yeah i'm i'm calling from a pay phone i just i'm i'm we have a bet going here okay all right i just yeah i'm fine i'm fine okay hang up none of them will check the little coin thing to see if the quarter came back right but when we did it when we were young you did it because sometimes the quarter would drop back into that little thing and you'd get your quarterback right it was such a treat but they wouldn't do that because it wouldn't even occur to them sure but those are little details too that details everybody every writing teacher will tell you details what's the first writing exercise you give to your students they read the first three chapters of the method writing book and they have to write a journal entry in which they write like they talk how long is the journal entry uh it could be 500 pages but for the sake of the class they can only read two pages because otherwise they could be reading 100 pages and would be there all night but i don't say you you can't you know write as much as you want in your journal for that day or that week but for the class limited to about 500 words which is about two pages so that we can respond to it which is 500 is a pretty good normal chunk but just a journal entry just write like you talk i i i want to hear your voice if you're not writing like a talk we will point out those sentences where you had uh he skillfully said you know adverbs adjectives all that writerly stuff we'll point it out and we'll we'll try to get you not to do that and then in anticipation of the next chapter we start identifying transformation lines and then the following week they have to write a journal entry writing like you talk but massaging a transformation line and sorry the transformation line again is i was hiding the birthday cake get rid of the birthday cake what's the story of your life and the truth of who you are i was hiding i didn't want people to see me i was afraid they wouldn't like me if they saw who i was they would hate me i'm not a good person i'm a bad boy well i was hiding ends up i'm a bad boy because i remembered being locked in the closet and i'm a bad boy that's just that's the bottom story of my life i'm hiding because i don't want people to see me i don't want people to see me because they'll know who i am if they see who i am inside they know i'm a bad person and then suddenly it came to me i'm a bad boy well that's a long way from i was hiding i'm a bad boy and then from i'm a bad boy i'm stuck which is where you ended up right so that's i'm teaching them how to massage a transformation line then we do uh then we do the image moment for two weeks because it's hard and then we do something called dreaded association which is another two weeks again too complicated to go into now but it was originally called the association exercise and when i would assign it to people and they would read it they would get notes from their mother as to why they were sick and couldn't come to class because they would dread it so so then i as a joke i called it the dreaded association exercise and that's what we call it and then of course they do it and they bring it to class and they're they're just shocked as hell how good it works and what they can do with it and how it can be a very creative thing and those are the four concepts in the first level write like you talk massage transformation line image moment and the dreaded association exercise how many of your students are actually able to write in a journal and not censor themselves and not try to be too writerly eventually all of them but in the beginning is that something that a lot of them struggle with many of them don't have a problem with it they they they haven't had enough experience writing that uh they know how to be writers the ones that have been writing a lot and who think of themselves as writers or i'm an actor you know they might have a little difficulty or it might just be a sentence or two here and there and so we pointed out i talk about the structure of the sentence and why that's written and not spoken that if you were talking you would have said it this way or it would go this way or that word would be there so we get into the structure of the sentence and the difference between speech and how we write for instance here's a sentence that is absolutely fine you'll see it in in books all the time it begins with a participle phrase standing by the window i could see it was going to rain nothing wrong with that sentence great sentence but we don't talk that way we don't begin sentences with participle phrases we don't say uh yeah i came home and standing by the window i could see it was going to rain that's not how we structure a sentence when we talk what we say is i was standing by the window and i could see it was going to rain or when i stood by the window i could see it was going to rain but never standing by the window comma i could see it was going to rain that's not how we talk so we get into the structure of sentences how it's not always a word you know because everybody has different vocabularies so it's not about that it's about the structure of the sentence how a sentence is structured and once you start to hear that the deep structure of speech as opposed to the deep structure of a literary construct it doesn't mean it's bad writing it just means you have to know the difference then if you know the difference you can choose when to do one and when to the other so maybe at the worst uh a few people will have one or two of those sentences somewhere in what they write and we deconstruct it and we talk about it so basically i'm getting them to be aware of of their writing that is speech-based now it's not always going to be that level two goes into those four tones that are not like you talk so we're writers and we can do that too but first we want to like acting we want to have a good foundation so where you write like you talk once in a while i'll get someone who's been writing a long time and they're really locked into their style and it's hard for them to shift out of it to because they think they just think it's natural to throw in those adverbs and adjectives and so forth but when you there's it's not good writing sometimes so sometimes even their writing writing is not good writing but most people take to it pretty well why is it not good writing when when someone's writing to writerly to to using different terms that we wouldn't use in normal conversation uh if you've got a laptop around google stephen king adverbs he's got an essay on it adverbs it's what amateurs do it's bad writing so don't take my word for it stephen king who's a good writer by the way excessive use of adverbs is the mark of an amateur um uh elmore leonard he had an article in the new york times review of books which was all about the 10 things that bad writers do the first one was excessive use of adverbs and often adjectives i mean you have to have adjectives sometime but you got to be careful um it was so well received that his publisher made it a book now how do you make a book out of one page article in the new york times reviewer book books i'll tell you you have illustrations on every page you have type that's very big and the paper is about as thick as a 2x4 and then you get a book and it's sold really well and number one is excessive use of adverbs and adjectives so you know this is not something that i made up while i was living in a cave every every professional writer will tell you that you can you can spot an amateur when they overuse adverbs and often even the adjectives so who am i to argue with stephen king and elmore leonard it's bad writing now there's other things that may not be bad writing but it's not how you talk so that's a different thing i want people to know the difference so that they can control when they're writing what effect they're going to create he mumbled he uh averred uh he implied he he shrugged you know uh i don't care if you live or die he shrugged so instead of saying a word that has to do with uttering it's it's a physical action i mean writers do that bad writers do that all the time and you know i feel like sometimes i got to go quit it quit it so keep it simple well that's a different issue oh okay you can say complicated things but you say it like you talk i'm not saying you can't write complicated sentences okay okay it's just a question of is that speech or is that a literary construct that came when people started to write the difference one of the problems a lot of people have with marcel proust is his fancy language if you read him fast you realize he's writing like he talks there's a great deal of eloquence in there but if you read it fast you realize oh he's talking and the elegance that you think you're seeing is often just long sentences some sentences are half a page but he's talking you would ask me about another book uh books i've read so another one that i read during the pandemic where it was on the libby app for the library was my salinger year so it was about a woman who worked at a publisher in i think the 90s and her job was to respond to jd salinger fans and it's so great they made a film and has margaret quality in it and uh right sounds funny to see it yeah but but she wanted to take care in responding to these fans because they were so emotional and they were so invested right in holden caulfield and she found that a lot of them didn't want to hear what she had to say they wanted to just have this image of what that character was and what the book meant right to help them character creates plot and voice creates character salinger never wrote another book in that voice if you read franny and zoe and raise high the roof beams carpenters it's a completely different style and voice if you read some of his short stories like uncle wiggly in connecticut or the laughing man it's not holding caulfield at all it's not that style that that was holden's voice it's unique and it's what makes his character so unique the voice you get the voice you get the character you get the character the plot will take care of itself yeah in fact they became very angry she was trying to help them yeah and they didn't want help they wanted to be angry and they wanted to be with holden they wanted to be with holden yeah it was really fascinating book yeah looking forward to seeing the films uh wait the challenger years yeah no my salander year and it's based on this woman in new york city in the 90s yeah it's really i don't think they're ever going to make a movie of catcher in the rye until when his book goes in the public domain or something because he won't allow that he's dead now but i think he has explicit instructions it's not to be sold to the movies yeah he had very rigid rules i believe it sounds like he was a nice man the way she described him in the book i don't know his urban legend might have been different but he he treated her well and so she just had very little interaction at the publishing house right but it was fascinating and just you know those things are kind of really not important whether the writer is a nice man or not writers can be son of a you we may not realize it but it really doesn't matter what matters is the world they create i don't care what salinger was like i love holden i love holden interesting so he created something that was real for me and that's that's all you can ask an author to do a writer should reach the reader it's not just about making themselves feel good or looking good to their peers it's about reaching the reader it's all of that i mean you do want to impress your peers i mean we're human we want other writers you know our peers to appreciate what we've done obviously i want people to like my poetry but it means a lot to me if another poet who i admire really thinks my poetry is good okay and i do want to reach my readers but at the same time i want to satisfy myself if if if what i did a writer sculpture painter makes me happy and i met the challenge then i'll move on at some point you can't really go by what people think of your work you have to do it because it's your calling it's what you have to do but who wouldn't want someone to like their work but is there a certain point where an author an artist becomes so controversial that it stops being about their work and now it's just the legend of the artist the mystique around them the reputation whether it's true or not okay and if that's true what what are we going to do about that and that's what i'm asking yeah what should should someone do if their their work is transcended to that point look everything is going to happen under the sun you know there's nothing i mean i i can't pontificate and say well it should be this way or it should be that way or it shouldn't be this way it shouldn't be that way you know what's going to happen and sometime it's out of the writer's control things happen that they didn't expect or they didn't want and sometimes they want that they they act a certain way and there becomes a legend about how they are and they cultivate that legend uh you know i mean writers are people and you know people are crazy not every crazy person writes a novel but some of us do it doesn't make us saying just because we can write a novel who was the artist that did the lacma lights chris yeah so he did that yeah chris chris brooke right burton yeah chris i love him i love him right chris bernstein i would have never expected that to be as iconographic and as popular as it is he did something that somehow captured the imagination of people and transcended it being one a spectacle and two a work of art it's something beyond that because on some level it's like a bunch of lights what's the big deal with that and on another level it's i mean it's not art what is it well it's a place people like to go to well less like a ride at coney island what's the difference you know i don't know but art sometimes uh connects to people in ways that we don't really anticipate or or understand there's just something about art that i don't know you just it like like duchamp's uh urinal you know he puts this urinal in a room in a museum and um it's done you could copy that and do something you know put something else in there that would be so ridiculous but he did it it's done he put a urinal in an army scene it's very famous so painters and sculptors as filmmakers they do something and sometimes you can't you can't you can analyze it all you want but there's an area that's unexplainable and i love the light thing that i mean i love to see people there uh i remember there was a uh what was it it wasn't a blackout but it was something and it was it was the only thing in the area that was lit and people were just having so much fun there so you know it's weird it's just have you have you seen the car thing the cars haven't been to lacma in a little bit oh i don't know if the cars are still there um did you see the film with the guy with the time with the clock it was called the clock and it exactly went with the time on clocks and it was a 24-hour film didn't see that one i mean it it was an experience i i i i went i was in paris a year later and it was being held in paris at the time but it's just a series of shots from movies that have a clock in them a time and as you watch it the time on the clock is exactly what time it is over a 24-hour period so it begins in the morning and and it ends at midnight um you know it begins to well it begins at midnight but then it ends at midnight uh the first five minutes you're bored and you're thinking i can't i'm not gonna be able to sit here for another five minutes and before you know it you're there for two hours three hours and it's riveting it's unbelie who would have thought to do that it's called the clock i mean it's it's in the beginning you couldn't see it all 24 hours because you could only see it during the hours that the museum was open so if the museum opened at nine in the morning and it closed at eight at night uh at eight at night uh they would say okay folks you gotta leave or you'd get there at eight in the morning you could see it from eight but you would never get to see what happened after eight or after midnight you know but then the closing so i'd gone several times and saw two or three hours of it at different times and then they said they were going to show all 24 hours at the museum the last day and i was there for the whole 24 hours oh wow and at the end there were i would say a quarter of the theater were people who'd been there the whole time and when it was over with we all stood up and cheered and were hugging each other like you made it and it was one of those transcendence experiences i've never forgotten it and it's utterly ridiculous i mean who would want to watch that every every scene was two seconds five seconds maybe 10 seconds and it was a clock it could be someone looked at their wrist watch could be a grandfather clock clock on a train station just scenes that had no connection at all how could you watch five hours of that it became mesmerizing it was unbelievable i tell you one of one of the most amazing things i ever saw what year was this two thousand something early maybe 20 years ago something like that yeah okay but i don't know if when they'll show it again but if they will people will go to you know it toured all over the world so but your question was about you know when an artist creates something you you never know what's going to happen you never know what's going to catch people's imagination i don't even know why we all stood up and cheered and and were hugging each other at the end maybe because we had been there for 24 hours and maybe because we were able to endure it i don't know what it was but it was a feeling of of exaltation it was amazing yeah i've never experienced that before because when when i saw it normally you would just walk out at some point or if you were there like it's six o'clock at night at eight o'clock the guy would come in and go okay folks we have to close it down the museum is closing so there was no like experience um but for that there was it was amazing did you stay up the full 24 hours that was the when it did the last show they specifically said it was going to be 24 hours before it was at the museum you could only see it during the museum hours consequently you were only seeing like if the museum opened at nine the first image you saw was nine o'clock and as the day wore on it would be ten one three five you could stay from nine to eight but you you'd still miss a lot and i never did stay more than four hours so when i went i would stay three maybe four hours and i'd go with friends and we would get loaded or something and watch it or something but that last night when it was going to be 24 hours i made i plan to be there for the whole thing um i think there was one point where i knew i had seen that twice an hour i'd seen it twice and i left and got myself something to eat and then i came back and my seat got taken so i had to stand against the wall but then eventually someone left and i sat down it was amazing read about it the clock check it out google it you

Channel: Film Courage

Views: 347,449

Keywords: Screenwriting tips, screenwriting 101, screenwriting for beginners, screenwriting techniques, screenwriting advice, writing a screenplay, how to write a movie, Jack Grapes, method writing, advanced method writing, poetry, how to write poetry, writing teacher, author, writing a great movie, filmcourage, film courage, interview

Id: ba9jAVzADY0

Length: 209min 39sec (12579 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 19 2021