Lecturette: The Writer’s Manifesto

Another in the series of lecturettes from old and/or defunct courses. This, from DU’s course called Writers on Writing.   ~Jenn

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On Attempting to Talk About Art–the Writer’s Manifesto

One of your major projects for this quarter is to compose a short Why I Write piece: a writer’s manifesto. What is it?

It’s a declaration of independence, an assertion, sounding the “barbaric yawp” (1) that says, “Yes, art is essential. Here’s a plethora of reasons why…”

But the catch-22 of this situation is that the moment you attempt to describe/capture this winsome creative process, the essence of it escapes words. Chapter 3 of Zen in the Art of Writing is called “How to Keep and Feed a Muse,” and addresses this issue with zest and gusto. (2) Yet artists and writers still compose essays about what they create. Can it be helpful to them, to try and pinpoint a method to their own incomprehensible, joyous madness?

An art-history major friend of mine once (in a sadistic mood, no doubt) forced me to read her homework. It was Kandinsky’s Artist’s Manifesto, and was (my friend moaned) not only badly written, but off-pissing as well.

K says that humanity is divided up into layers which, stacked on top of one another, form a pyramid. Peasants fill the largest, bottom layer, then lowly artisans, merchants, and so on up until you get to the artists, perched on the very top in the “upper triangle” of existence. Needless to say, anyone in the stratified layers below are either too stupid or too jealous to ever understand or appreciate art (let alone create it!) and the light it supposedly attempts to shine into the darkness of their ignorance. (3)

Uhhh, okay,  Mr. K, but I’m a peasant and an artist. Does that mean I’m too stupid to understand my own work? (4) Or is it that only artists understand art, and therefore audiences, viewers and readers should be obsolete? Boy, K, a little lonely in that upper triangle? That latest brilliant painting too misunderstood by the plebes to pay rent this month?

Shut up and paint.

Kandinsky is a terrific artist–I’ve always loved his work. But get him to start talking about his art and, well, you see the problems in this particular instance. Unfortunately, Ray Bradbury and Ursula K. LeGuin notwithstanding, I’ve read even great writers with a healthy vision of their work fail to describe why they write, or wax cosmic until they realize they’re trying to describe the indescribable. My Kandinsky-suffering friend and I concluded our rant with a Koran whose wisdom I often find useful: “Shut up and paint.”

Okay, Jenn (you’re no doubt thinking): so why are you assigning such an impossible task to us?

Because that’s what all writing is: an attempt to pin nirvana into a fleeting image with words. To put one foot into the infinite, come back and tell the tale, like the shamans of old. An accomplishment is merely a frame around one small leaf of the great tree (5) but by saying yes, I write. I write because…you add a dash of Tabasco to your labors.

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(1) Walt Whitman

(2) zest and gusto are two of Bradbury’s favorite words he revisits in that book.

(3) Really. It’s all there in his manifesto–this sort of classist hierarchy.

(4) Shaddap.

(5) “Leaf by Niggle,” Tree and Leaf, J.R.R. Tolkien

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Drunk, and in charge of a bicycle

Another in the series of lecturettes from old and/or defunct courses. This from a course called “Writers on Writing” I taught a few times at DU many years back. This is a Week 6 lecture from 2006, and their readings would have been Ray Bradbury’s Zen in the Art of Writing and Philip Pullman’s speech about writing here.

 

Drunk, and in Charge of a Bicycle (1)

My favorite (book) is always the one I’m working on, or the one that’s just come out. Not the one I just finished working on, because as soon as the manuscript leaves home, I become convinced that it’s the most appalling piece of earwax that ever slew trees. Not until the typeset galleys arrive for proofing do I begin to think that I’ve been a teensy bit hard on the poor thing. And when the author’s copies of the finished book land on the doorstep, voila! A miracle of transformation. It’s suddenly a dear little book, with such a cute little spine, and the most adorable running heads…(2)

The main idea I’d like to briefly ruminate about this week is that of the Muse (in Bradbury’s terms); and this concept that if you force your writing, it won’t come. How many writing instructors have you had that make you do Timed Writing or I Remember or Morning Pages until you’re plaid in the face? What these exercises do is they tease the Muse into following you–the more you write down “this is stupid, I remember nothing, I can’t see straight, how much longer, my knees are falling asleep, I have carpal tunnel syndrome…” sudddenly in the middle of the dross will emerge a sparkle. Something weird, unusual for you, something you would never plan on writing, something truly worth cutting and polishing and setting in white gold and selling on the black market. But the little gem wouldn’t have come without sifting through all that dirt first.

My own version of Bradbury’s cute little Muse concept is a bit grittier, and came first from a theatrical experience, not a writing

Fuck it, we’re the Muses.

one at all. Beware, it’s a Rated R phrase:  I call it the Fuck It Moment.

We’ve all had them–struggling with that long par 4 hole, trying so hard to swing a carefully chosen club just right, and what happens? Plunk! in the pond. (3) Only when you’re so frustrated you’re almost going to scream (except you can’t because it’s a golf course and you’re supposed to keep quiet), THEN you think to yourself, “Fuck it!” and just swing the damn thing, and…what? Whoa! 280 yards, straight down the fairway!

My own personal ground- and career-breaking Fuck It Moment came when I was in the final semester of one of the final studios in acting school, the hard-core training nearly done. I was doing a scene with a good friend, also a fabulous actor, and we specifically chose this scene because we knew we were superior actors and it was a notoriously difficult scene to pull off well. (4) I’m sure you can see what’s coming, right? We labored on that scene until we were both exhausted, every time we rehearsed it, and it remained nothing but mediocre at best. Over and over our instructor said, “I don’t understand why this isn’t working for you.” The scene was shallow, melodramatic and boring, and and we were at our wits’ end. No amount of homework-rehearsal made it better–in fact, it just made our scene worse as we began to hate it as we burned out on it.

Time came for the final showing of this scene in class, pretty much one of the last bits of graded acting we were to do for our BFA degree. Not only did we know perfectly well our scene still sucked, but the instructor knew, too. She’d given us private rehearsals (extra ones) to no avail. Here we were, the two talents, about to bite it in front of everyone that had, up till then, respected us. What to do?

That’s right: I said “Fuck it! Let’s just do this,” to my partner, and we did. Neither of us cared anymore–all the work we had done wasn’t helping, so fuck it. I went off, laughing thorugh most of my lines, moving around the studio in ways I’d never rehearsed, letting my voice go everywhere in my range, and succumbing to exhausted tears. Then laughing through them. My partner reacted wholly honestly to my weirdness, not sure what to do about any of it but just go on.

When we finished, breathing heavily, mussed and sweaty, there was a deep silence in the studio. Then, astonished applause.

Of course, if you know anything about the scene, you’ll notice that what I just described is exactly what is needed in this case: the madwoman and her shocked lover. My forced, depressing-dramatic ideas of how to “act mad” and my partner’s overly-morose ideas of what his “reactions” should be were too calculated and therefore not the correct choices, acting-wise. I had, as Bradbury says, scared the Muse away by whipping the scene to death with what I thought were “good acting techniques.” When I said Fuck It, I let go all those set ideas, all those expectations, all my inhibitions and went with literally whatever, NOT THINKING about whether it was any good or not because clearly it wasn’t going to be.The result of which is some of the best acting I’ve done to date, and certainly one of the best scenes in the class.

I’m sure you’ve understood by now that my point in relating this personal anecdote is that it relates completely and absolutely to the process of writing (and most arts, I would aver). The catch with this kind of thinking (as some of you observed last week in the DBs) is that the letting go cannot and does not work unless first you have a solid base of technique. This is something that Bradbury, in my opinion, doesn’t stress enough. If you have been writing pages and pages a day, if you read constantly, if you take classes, then you will have a good intake and output that will mean when you reach your own Fuck It Moment, you will know how to write to keep up with it. If I hadn’t had nearly four years acting training before the above anecdotal example, you better believe the scene would have fallen apart in a big mess. So remember that too: it’s the same thing Pullman says in our next week’s reading: he started with the yellow Post-it notes, then ended up throwing them away and just writing. But the Post-It note phase is still essential to the process. Without that solid base, your wild ride wth the Muse will leave you with nothing more than wounds and a big mess. But with the solid base of technique, experience, and/or training, you’ll get off the roller coaster bruised and shaking, but with a good first draft clutched in your fist.

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(1) This chapter, in Zen in the Art of Writing, is optional reading, as it is very similar to past-read chapters. I just love the title so much…

(2) Emma Bull, from an online interview at greenmanreview.com.

(3) From Yertle the Turtle, Dr. Seuss.

(4) The final scene from Chekhov’s The Seagull. Nina comes back and is out of her mind. You know, “I am an actress, I am a seagull,” that? Those of you from Creative Expressions class can understand my approach to Chekhov now in a new light.

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Three Rules: The Monomyth Revisited

Since I’m starting this blog over again, I’m reposting (as opposed to riposting) some of the meatier posts from the past. This is actually a re-repost, as it is an old lecturette for a now-defunct DU course I designed and taught back in the day, called Writers on Writing. I’s my take on Campbell’s theory of the monomyth. Please to enjoy.   ~Jenn

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Three Rules for Protagonists: the Monomyth Revisited               

Every morning I jump out of bed and step on a landmine. The landmine is me. After the explosion, I spend the rest of the day putting the pieces together.[1]

Back in acting school, we learned a magic Three Rules that we were to adhere to whenever we performed a new character (which was often a couple times a week).  No matter how big a role, the Three Rules for Actors worked to make a performance authentic, dynamic, and compelling.

When an actor plays a mood, she dissolves instantly into sham.  Mood spelled backwards is Doom for the actor.[2]In other words, if one “plays sad” the performance will seem false and cheesy to an audience. If one plays a verb, an objective, then one is playing an action instead of an emotion.

Three Rules for Actors:

“What do I want?” (objective)

“What do I do to get what I want?” (tactics)

“What stands in my way?”  (obstacles)

Actors ask these three questions of themselves as the character they’ve been assigned, and often will write verbs in the margins of their scripts (tactics = action words) to guide them along the scenes.  Any story can be boiled down to this formula. A character does actions to get her objective. When one action doesn’t work, she’ll try another. And the audience will want to know what she’ll do next, and if she’ll end up achieving her objective. When the character either achieves her objective, or discovers it can’t be achieved, the story is over. A new objective is a new story.

These three rules, though taught to actors, I have found to be essential in the understanding of story structure. A writer can ask their protagonist these three questions and the narrative nearly writes itself. Ray Bradbury probably never heard the Actor’s Rules, but his story-writing instructions are a direct reiteration of the objective/tactics/obstacles formula:

Find a character, like yourself, who will want something or not want something, with all his heart. Give him running orders. Shoot him off. Then follow as fast as you can go. The character, in his great love, or hate, will rush you through to the end of the story.[3]

This formula works for anything narrative—fiction, non-fiction, or (obviously) drama. Poetry is about image and sound, so it doesn’t go by the Actor’s Rules. But anything that has events, things happening, a central character (even the writer-as-narrator of a personal essay) has added dynamism and a clean plot if the Three Rules are kept in mind.

Being shown the ropes. At Metro’s theatre department, 2014. See what I did there?

This is where a lot of what’s called “literary fiction” falls into traps, and genre fiction writers get carried away.

Writers are faced with so much that is less than artistic sitting on the bookshelves, many wonder what they can do to be noticed by an inundated publisher or agent, and, not wanting to “sell out,” they try and write really, really good stuff. This is the problem. If a writer adds too much to the Three Rules above, it’s like adding too much stuff to a base skeleton: it becomes an overweight monstrosity that’s dressed in too many clashing layers of clothes. As Philip Pullman said in his Carnegie Medal Acceptance Speech,

…in adult literary fiction, stories are there on sufferance. Other things are felt to be more important: technique, style, literary knowingness. Adult writers who deal in straightforward stories find themselves sidelined into a genre such as crime or science fiction, where no one expects literary craftsmanship.”[4]

And what happens to the genre writers? They put the same flesh and clothes on the skeleton that hundreds have done before them, but those hundreds did it better. What results from the genre writers is a cheaply made clone that’s not any better than fan-fiction (and worse than some).

What to do?

Really, the answer is simple (which is what makes it so frakking difficult to execute). It has to do with Mamet’s statement of simplicity in storytelling:

As long as the protagonist wants something, the audience will want something. As long as the protagonist is clearly going out and attempting to get that something, the audience will wonder whether or not he’s going to succeed. The moment the protagonist, or the auteur of the movie, stops trying to get something and starts trying to influence someone, the audience will go to sleep.[5]

In other words, stop trying to be a good writer. Just follow your character’s strong desire, and it will become a compelling story. That’s it. Don’t write a masterpiece of linguistic gymnastics with “a prophylactic garnish of irony.”[6] That’s not what people who want books want to read. People want stories, they’ll watch movies or play video games to get stories; or as the pithy Pullman says again, “We need stories so much that we’re even willing to read bad books to get them, if the good books won’t supply them.”[7]

I’ve had writing students struggle against this: they cry, “But if all stories are just the Three Rules, then anything I write won’t be original?!” Writers shouldn’t be afraid of this, the Three Rules for All Story, any more than they should be afraid of their own skeletons. I mean, think about it: if you stand my skeleton and your skeleton next to each other, there’d be hardly any noticeable difference. It’s the flesh and clothes and actions we take that make us different from each other, original works of art.

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ENDNOTES

[1] Ray Bradbury, Zen in the Art of Writing

[2] Uttered by many of my previous acting profs, at CU Boulder and a couple UNC seminars.

[3] From Zen in the Art of Writing

[4] From http://www.randomhouse.com/features/pullman/author/carnegie.html

[5] From Mamet’s On Directing Film

[6] Pullman’s speech again

[7] Ibid.

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SOURCES

Bradbury, Ray, Zen in the Art of Writing. Joshua Odell Editions. Santa Barbara, CA: 1994.

Mamet, David. On Directing Film. Penguin. New York: 1992.

Pullman, Philip. “Carnegie Medal Acceptance Speech,” His Dark Materials. 2008. Accessed 11/9/09. Available: <http://www.randomhouse.com/features/pullman/author/carnegie.html&gt;