I have a bad opinion of online study programs. I’m not sure why. The only program that I’ve ever been involved with — at UCLA Extension — was AMAZING. I took a screenwriting workshop there with Steve Duncan which transformed my relationship to narrative structure. I also taught a course in their program which convinced me that they are extremely serious about maintaining a high level of instruction. If you’re interested in online study, check them out.
the awesomest online study program I know
November 17th, 2008dear joe writer
November 9th, 2008Dear Joe Writer,
What’s the deal with writing in cafés? I’ve been afraid to try it because I don’t know what the rules are. Isn’t writing in cafés just about sex? Isn’t it just an excuse to look cool and attract playmates? What’s the best way to focus with so many people around you? What do you do when some persistent person (possibly even an attractive person who wants to sleep with you) won’t take no for an answer and continues to intrude on your workspace?
Sincerely,
Looking-Through-The-Starbucks-Window
Dear Looking-Through-The-Window:
I have to admit to myself, sadly, that my days of writing in cafés may be over. It’s a young man’s game, and I’ve got a family now, so, no matter what my chronological age, I am no longer a young man. Yes, I will dip back into it from time to time, but it will be as a once great athlete shows up for an autograph signing or a fantasy camp. It’s now time to pass on my skills.
Before I begin, I would like to dispel a few misconceptions about writing in cafés. It’s so easy to misunderstand. Are we – the people who write in cafés – poseurs? The answer is complicated. Yes, we are poseurs to the extent that we enjoy doing our work in front of other people. And, no, we are not poseurs in the sense that any real accomplishment as a café writer depends on rejecting the idea of performance entirely.
Is this a paradox? Yes. But, for more than a decade, it was one of the most delightful paradoxes of my life.
There are two things I hate about writing: paperwork and being alone. There’s not much I can do about the paperwork, but the being alone part got solved when the world, about fifteen years ago, seemed to be suddenly filled with public places where I could write. With the advent of laptops and Starbucks, a whole new world opened for me.
Isn’t writing in cafés just about sex? Isn’t it just an excuse to look cool and attract playmates?
Ah, yes, this is the heart of the paradox. The yes that is no, the no that is stop-by-my-table-and-see-me-sometime. If you’re trying to get laid by writing in a café, you won’t. You won’t get any writing done, either. If you’re trying to write – that is, keeping people away from you as much as possible, perfecting a total concentration on your work, discouraging even the innocent “you mind if I share this outlet with you?” then you will probably get some sweet stuff from time to time. Because, in that case, you will be a real writer, and for some reason real writers are kind of attractive.
What’s the best way to focus with so many people around you?
This is pretty much the same thing I’m saying in response to question #1 – the way out is in, the way in is out. To the extent that you can actually see yourself as a brilliant writer doing brilliant work – and actually be the public version of that person – then the people around you will aid you in your concentration. On the other hand, try seeing yourself as a poseur, sitting in a Starbucks trying to attract women by pretending that you’re a writer. If you’re anything like me, you’ll run screaming from that image with such force that you’ll actually get some good work done.
What do you do when some persistent person (possibly even an attractive person who wants to sleep with you) won’t take no for an answer and continues to intrude on your workspace?
Okay, then, this is the graduate seminar, isn’t it? This was one of the greatest epiphanies of my life: sexual opportunity will still find you if you push it away, but your work will not get done if you abandon it to court sexual opportunity. This is where many fail, but also where many great careers are launched: you must have faith that someone who wants to sleep with you because you’re a writer in a café will only want to sleep with you more because you’re a writer in a café who can’t be bothered with them because you are too busy actually being a writer in a café.
Yours,
Joe Writer
why I love Todd Hasak-Lowy’s brilliant novel CAPTIVES
October 12th, 2008Fitzgerald was famously flummoxed by the American film industry, and he probably set a precedent for every fiction writer since. Fiction writers who truly understand Hollywood tend to keep quiet about it, maybe for fear that the money train will no longer stop by their house if they don’t. Novels about Hollywood, therefore, tend to seem like Science Fiction. Folks speak a kind of stilted film babble, and villains are often both venal and stupid. Writer who are otherwise quite capable of describing human beings going about their days are baffled by scenes that they probably know very well. Jane Smiley and Rick Moody come to mind as examples of great writers whom we want to ask, “Have you ever actually met a producer?” On some level, it might just be the envy of a dying art form for a very lively art, as though the novels themselves were jealous of the movies.
And yet I think there’s a simpler – and much more interesting – explanation. Paul Schrader, a man who should know, let the cat out of the bag when he admitted that film didn’t actually even need a screenplay, that it was a literary form that needed story but not necessarily words. When I read these sentences, I wondered why more people didn’t run out into the street and scream. Maybe no one pays much attention to Schrader anymore. Maybe fiction has embarked on the enterprise of pretending that film doesn’t exist. Writers who don’t need to write? It sounded like something that had been cooked up by a Stalinist self-help guru. And yet I knew in my heart that it was also quite true. The only thing worse than a film writer who knows his terribly low place in the pecking order is one who doesn’t, one who thinks screenwriting is a literary form.
Into this breech walks Todd Hasak-Lowy’s brilliant novel Captives, a story about a very successful screenwriter who has a high concept idea that nearly destroys his life. It’s a testament to the prescience of Hasak-Lowy’s vision that I read this novel with an increasing sense of moral anxiety. A writer of big budget thrillers, Daniel Bloom starts to get an idea for a movie about a man who takes responsibility for the sins of both corrupt governments and corporations. This man, a sniper, will kill off the men who are responsible for the greed and vast criminal enterprises that bedevil American culture. So far, so good. But as Daniel works through the idea in the manner that many screenwriters do – walking the dog, drinking coffee, calling his friends – the idea starts to become urgent and much more morally precise. No, the screenwriter thinks, this sniper won’t kill the men responsible, he will kill the people who are important to these men: their brothers, their wives, maybe even their children. And maybe not even people that are so important, but also cousins, nephews, in-laws. After all, isn’t their destruction diffuse? Shouldn’t their payback be terrifyingly spread-out, too.
As Daniel gets drawn deeper into his own story – building the structure as carefully as a man who hopes to suffer from Stockholm syndrome – he begins to wonder if what he’s doing can even be done. Not just whether it’s morally defensible to introduce this kind of narrative virus into the world, but also whether any studio will actually buy it. As he works out the actual “beats” of the story, his agent (an insanely wonderful character) and a bottom-line loving producer push him further into his own heart of narrative darkness. When a nearly insane Rabbi encourages him to retreat to Israel, Daniel embraces this solution the way another writer might seek inspiration at Canyon Ranch. Israel turns out to be a great idea: taxi drivers and barely-able-to-shave soldiers are the best development executives that he can find. They totally get the wilderness that he’s wandering into.
The essence of Hasak-Lowy’s accomplishment is this: he has animated an actual human being whose job on earth it is to write scripts. In my experience, people who think they understand screenwriters don’t. They are both the solidest of writers and the most vacuous As writers, they are often both ridiculously well-paid and derided. The auteur theory advanced a notion that the studios have understood from day one: writers are schmucks. Schrader was right that screenplays don’t require words, and the yet the words they do require have more to do with the world of commerce and reality than even the best selling novelist could hope to understand.
At the risk of hyperbole, I’ll say that I’ve never read anything truer about the essential dilemma of that kind of writer – that kind of person – except for perhaps the oral histories of early screenwriters that I used to gobble up when I was college. These are the men and women who invented the Twentieth Century, and yet, somewhere on their way up to the Academy Awards podium they are almost always effaced by the very thing that they have created. It is their destiny – and no one knows this better than screenwriter Daniel Bloom – to watch their creations disappear directly into the culture.
terror and tough-minded elegance
October 6th, 2008These sentences will not leave my mind. That’s either because they are so damn well-written or because they scare the crap out of me.
“The next president must do one thing, and one thing only, if he is to be judged a success: He must prevent al Qaida, or an al Qaida imitator, from gaining control of a nuclear device and detonating it in America. Many proliferation experts I have spoken to judge the chance of such a detonation to be as high as 50 percent in the next 10 years. Only technical complications prevent al Qaida from executing a nuclear attack today. The nuclear destruction of Lower Manhattan, or downtown Washington, would cause the deaths of thousands, or hundreds of thousands: a catastrophic depression; the reversal of globalization; a permanent climate of fear in the West; and the comprehensive repudiation of America’s culture of civil liberties.”
Jeffrey Goldberg in The New York Times
william james on breakfast
September 27th, 2008Just in case you thought my sweet old uncle William James doesn’t still have it: I came across this quote when I opened an old Selected Papers on Philosophy. At the exact moment my eyes came across these words, my son was dancing gleefully to Blood on the Tracks.
“A bill of fare with one real raisin on it instead of the word ‘raisin,’ with one real egg instead of the word ‘egg,’ might be an inadequate meal, but it would at least be a commencement of reality.”
dear joe writer
September 24th, 2008Dear Joe Writer:
What’s the deal with writers anyway? Are they all just drunks and drug addicts and people you wouldn’t want to date? Why don’t they all just get real jobs and stop spending all our our money spreading feces all over themselves and pickling religious icons in urine.
Wants To Know in Ohio
Dear Wants To Know:
Writers are the voice of our best selves. They are, as Joyce said, the “uncreated conscience of [our] race.” The rest of the world needs us desperately for reasons that I will go into once I’ve thought a few up. Although I myself have spent a fair amount of time spreading feces and pickling religious icons in urine, you’re getting writers confused with artists. Artists are scumbags. Given a choice between dating an artist or a writer, you always want to go with … a rich film producer with several lovers on the side who will leave you alone to spend his money.
Yours,
Joe Writer
oh, boy, did I love this book: PICTURES AT A REVOLUTION
September 5th, 2008Mike Nichols, a party at Jane Fonda’s house, meeting Buck Henry:
In the middle of the party, and yet, standing at a cocked eyebrow’s distance from it, was Mike Nichols. Once again an immigrant in a new land, he surveyed the tribal rituals, the lapses of etiquette, the deferences and courtesies and small humiliations of this hothouse of West Coast privilege and restlessness, and filed them away from future use. At one point in the evening, he wandered from the crowd and found himself under the canopy of a huge tree around which part of the tent had been set up. A small knot of revelers was slouched around the trunk, and when Nichols approached, one of them looked up at him and said, “Are you having a good time in L.A., Mike?”
Nichols responded in his slow deadpan, “Yes. Here under the shadow of this great tree, I have found peace.”
The laugh he got came from Buck Henry.
From Pictures at a Revolution By Mark Harris
oh, boy, did I love this book: PICTURES AT A REVOLUTION
September 5th, 2008Warren Beatty on casting:
“Casting is destiny,” says Warren Beatty. “Particularly in movies, because casting is character — and character is plot. Casting really controls story. One guy would do a thing, another guy wouldn’t. And if you’re the guy in the close-up, character acting isn’t going to help — you either are that guy, or you aren’t.”
From Pictures at a Revolution By Mark Harris
oh, boy, do I love this book: PICTURES AT A REVOLUTION
August 25th, 2008Beatty returned to New York and decided to make one final run at Penn, telling Abe Lastfogel, the William Morris agent they shared, that he was going to lock himself in a room with Penn until he agreed to direct Bonnie and Clyde. Lastfogel stepped in and set up a lunch between the two men at Dinty Moore’s. “I didn’t stand a chance,” Penn wrote later. “Warren can be the most relentlessly persuasive person I know…I had capitulated by the time Warren had finished his complicated order for salad.”
From Pictures at a Revolution By Mark Harris
z-grip retractable ballpoint pen, clear barrel, black ink
August 25th, 2008I’m a sucker for a great pen. And my greatest pen today is this Zebra that I am holding in my hand right now (I write in a notebook before I post it here). What do I love so muh about this pen? Aside from the fact that it’s simply, blackly stylish, that it’s inexpensive, that it gives me a precise but bold line which works well for both writing and sketching…well, I’m not sure that there’s anything that I don’t love about this pen. When I first saw it, I dismissed it as a Pilot knock-off, but those Pilot pens never gave me this kind of happiness. Even my beloved Fisher space pen – which I am never without – seems prissy compared to this Zebra. Will I never need another pen? The only reason I won’t say that is because I love my other pens too much to risk hurting their feelings.