Winter came for me all at once, old man. The leaves turned; inside that’s how we die. First the winds grow cold. That’s first. But only first. Remember my love to this world, this world that hated me so.
Where do we sleep when dreams are denied us? Where do we find that refuge? In the waking hours? That blind us with bitter sunlight? Or somewhere deeper inside? Where all but the most cowardly are fearful to tread.
I have seen the halls my fathers built. All of them. The halls bled for me and the fathers scream through me; ten thousand times over, I remember their smells and their stares. God, strip this mind from me, and let me sleep forever.
It's interesting how the creative mind works, how it shuffles (and cycles) through all of our past even as it exists and expresses itself purposefully in the present.
Last week, a friend and I were working on a script for a psychological/zombie-flick idea we've come up with. It was getting late in the evening and good-natured fuckery was beginning to seep into our...or at least my work ethic.
Script writing is a new form of story-telling for me and one that was initially, and at times still can be, a bit daunting. It's because of how terse script language is, how matter-of-fact and straight forward it reads to my eyes and mind.
There are times when writing, "James shot Jill in the neck. Jill clasps a hand to her wound. She falls over. James fires into her body again. Jill is dead." works--to my writing sensibilities, there are times when this kind of direct, Hemmingway-esq simplicity conveys a deeper poetry. But writing entire pages using that dry, non-descriptive, anti-emotional language? And only being able to dip into "flavor" writing during dialogue? Yep. That's a new experience for me when it comes to writing and I could only take so much of this stolid, utilitarian molding of words before my essentially emotion-driven (and, by way of that, sometimes asinine) character rose to the fore.
I know that one of the rules of editing--the golden rule of the re-write, actually--is "omit needless words." But, the knowing of this does not make my first drafts any less verbose--I think you folks can tell, for example, which of these journal entries I bother editing and which I do not--nor does it alter my "in the moment" writing habits. Editing, for me, is the spit shine that comes after the initial act of creation; I slash a path through the snow with my imagination, writing as quickly as possible, and then head back to true the course--to dot my i's and cross my t's, in other words.
To me, that's what creating is: holding up a light in the darkness and using it to find our way. The light is our own life, our own imagination: the joys, the sorrows, the trials, the setbacks--all of the things that shape who we are and how we perceive. That light is the part of us that knows both parts of ourselves and parts of the story (or song, or painting, or etc) that we're working on. But, please notice the intentional redundancy at work there and meditate on it for a moment. I believe that creating, like life, is something that we can only know so much of at any one moment because it is in its truest form constantly in flux--fluid--and to attempt to instill a general, all-encompassing concept of "truth" over it only serves to ebb the natural flow of energy.
What I'm saying here, pertaining to writing, is that all of those outlines, idea bubbles and story-telling spin wheels that are brought up in creative writing classes--all of those things? Those things should be thrown right out the fucking window and into the trash heap down below, where they can sleep their good sleep and hopefully dream a little dream of their own. Because, when creating, there is a huge difference between knowing "part" of a story's plot and purpose in your mind and believing you know "all" of those things. Stories are like life, we live and we write and in doing so we are making life, and like the lives we live these make-believe lives cannot be shoved into a pen and be made to obediently wait for us to give them permission to breathe.
Don't get me wrong; make believe can be, and is, made in that suffocating manner. And you can always tell when it is; the stories are essentially DOA. The plot is either predictable or generally unmoving, the characters are cardboard cut outs and the entire fiasco looks/reads/feels like a farce--like something trying to be rather than something that is. And, in my opinion, that's because the people responsible for this piece of story-telling did not allow their work to just be, to organically grow and change and live. Instead, they trudged forward, head down, eyes set, already knowing everything there is to know about their characters and plot; they held steadfast to these beliefs even as the direction of the wind changed, even when their internal compass told them they should now head north instead of west. And so, out came a story saturated with this ideology; a sad and usually dismissible creature more concerned with trying to be than being.
End semantic opining about the creative process.
And so, anyway and as I was saying, John and I were working on this script of ours. It was getting late and we were both running on fumes and coffee. And because of all of what I've mentioned, because I was tired and because, after spending several hours working on this script (which I do enjoy--both the process and the story we're telling by way of it) and writing in this unfamiliar style, I opted to do something off-the-cuff. I grabbed the keyboard and in the space of a minute typed out the italicized poem at the top of this entry.
I did it mostly because I was tired, as I said; I also did it mostly to make us laugh. I did it without really thinking--I just hammered it out and afterwards we cackled like fools, reading these Shakespearean lines in the middle of our gritty and bloody and somber story.
I typed it out as a three-part monologue, spoken sequentially by three different characters. Each paragraph signifies the perspective shifting from one character to the next; each paragraph is a highly dramatized account of that character's thoughts and feelings.
Interesting how, looking at all three blocks of rant set one above the other, I can see a connection between them--and I can see myself as the hub of that connection.
I completely agree that, for creative people, everything that we create is an echo of our own experiences and thoughts. For a storyteller, all of our characters are fragments of our own mind; our past is our own, but it also belongs to and resides within every man, woman and child we magic out of the creative ether.
And I already knew the point that I'm driving at here--that we do these things, these things occur, even when we are not operating with the express intent of calling them forth. But that's the magic of it--that's what motivated me to type up this entry. I was not thinking of my past, my alcoholism or my experiences in either realm in that moment of late-night script fuckery. When I wrote those lines, those over-the-top, romantic lines of dialogue, I was not consciously making a connection to either myself or my experiences--what I was doing was making a joke.
But that's not all of how "doing" works. The part that's on top, the part that we "know," is always stirred along by the currents underneath. After the waters have stilled, after that moment of "doing" has become "done," we can usually see what lays beneath its surface.
And our own face. We can always see our own face, reflected back at us.
So, three paragraphs, three different characters in a script with different backgrounds and perspectives and written in the space of a minute. And all of it, when stacked one on the other, looking like a swatch of lyric from a darker, drunker time in my life.
It's interesting how the creative mind works, how it shuffles (and cycles) through all of our past even as it exists and expresses itself purposefully in the present.
Last week, a friend and I were working on a script for a psychological/zombie-flick idea we've come up with. It was getting late in the evening and good-natured fuckery was beginning to seep into our...or at least my work ethic.
Script writing is a new form of story-telling for me and one that was initially, and at times still can be, a bit daunting. It's because of how terse script language is, how matter-of-fact and straight forward it reads to my eyes and mind.
There are times when writing, "James shot Jill in the neck. Jill clasps a hand to her wound. She falls over. James fires into her body again. Jill is dead." works--to my writing sensibilities, there are times when this kind of direct, Hemmingway-esq simplicity conveys a deeper poetry. But writing entire pages using that dry, non-descriptive, anti-emotional language? And only being able to dip into "flavor" writing during dialogue? Yep. That's a new experience for me when it comes to writing and I could only take so much of this stolid, utilitarian molding of words before my essentially emotion-driven (and, by way of that, sometimes asinine) character rose to the fore.
I know that one of the rules of editing--the golden rule of the re-write, actually--is "omit needless words." But, the knowing of this does not make my first drafts any less verbose--I think you folks can tell, for example, which of these journal entries I bother editing and which I do not--nor does it alter my "in the moment" writing habits. Editing, for me, is the spit shine that comes after the initial act of creation; I slash a path through the snow with my imagination, writing as quickly as possible, and then head back to true the course--to dot my i's and cross my t's, in other words.
To me, that's what creating is: holding up a light in the darkness and using it to find our way. The light is our own life, our own imagination: the joys, the sorrows, the trials, the setbacks--all of the things that shape who we are and how we perceive. That light is the part of us that knows both parts of ourselves and parts of the story (or song, or painting, or etc) that we're working on. But, please notice the intentional redundancy at work there and meditate on it for a moment. I believe that creating, like life, is something that we can only know so much of at any one moment because it is in its truest form constantly in flux--fluid--and to attempt to instill a general, all-encompassing concept of "truth" over it only serves to ebb the natural flow of energy.
What I'm saying here, pertaining to writing, is that all of those outlines, idea bubbles and story-telling spin wheels that are brought up in creative writing classes--all of those things? Those things should be thrown right out the fucking window and into the trash heap down below, where they can sleep their good sleep and hopefully dream a little dream of their own. Because, when creating, there is a huge difference between knowing "part" of a story's plot and purpose in your mind and believing you know "all" of those things. Stories are like life, we live and we write and in doing so we are making life, and like the lives we live these make-believe lives cannot be shoved into a pen and be made to obediently wait for us to give them permission to breathe.
Don't get me wrong; make believe can be, and is, made in that suffocating manner. And you can always tell when it is; the stories are essentially DOA. The plot is either predictable or generally unmoving, the characters are cardboard cut outs and the entire fiasco looks/reads/feels like a farce--like something trying to be rather than something that is. And, in my opinion, that's because the people responsible for this piece of story-telling did not allow their work to just be, to organically grow and change and live. Instead, they trudged forward, head down, eyes set, already knowing everything there is to know about their characters and plot; they held steadfast to these beliefs even as the direction of the wind changed, even when their internal compass told them they should now head north instead of west. And so, out came a story saturated with this ideology; a sad and usually dismissible creature more concerned with trying to be than being.
End semantic opining about the creative process.
And so, anyway and as I was saying, John and I were working on this script of ours. It was getting late and we were both running on fumes and coffee. And because of all of what I've mentioned, because I was tired and because, after spending several hours working on this script (which I do enjoy--both the process and the story we're telling by way of it) and writing in this unfamiliar style, I opted to do something off-the-cuff. I grabbed the keyboard and in the space of a minute typed out the italicized poem at the top of this entry.
I did it mostly because I was tired, as I said; I also did it mostly to make us laugh. I did it without really thinking--I just hammered it out and afterwards we cackled like fools, reading these Shakespearean lines in the middle of our gritty and bloody and somber story.
I typed it out as a three-part monologue, spoken sequentially by three different characters. Each paragraph signifies the perspective shifting from one character to the next; each paragraph is a highly dramatized account of that character's thoughts and feelings.
Interesting how, looking at all three blocks of rant set one above the other, I can see a connection between them--and I can see myself as the hub of that connection.
I completely agree that, for creative people, everything that we create is an echo of our own experiences and thoughts. For a storyteller, all of our characters are fragments of our own mind; our past is our own, but it also belongs to and resides within every man, woman and child we magic out of the creative ether.
And I already knew the point that I'm driving at here--that we do these things, these things occur, even when we are not operating with the express intent of calling them forth. But that's the magic of it--that's what motivated me to type up this entry. I was not thinking of my past, my alcoholism or my experiences in either realm in that moment of late-night script fuckery. When I wrote those lines, those over-the-top, romantic lines of dialogue, I was not consciously making a connection to either myself or my experiences--what I was doing was making a joke.
But that's not all of how "doing" works. The part that's on top, the part that we "know," is always stirred along by the currents underneath. After the waters have stilled, after that moment of "doing" has become "done," we can usually see what lays beneath its surface.
And our own face. We can always see our own face, reflected back at us.
So, three paragraphs, three different characters in a script with different backgrounds and perspectives and written in the space of a minute. And all of it, when stacked one on the other, looking like a swatch of lyric from a darker, drunker time in my life.
