dfmamea.com: Year One
Holy smoley – it’s a year already.
Plug-time because it’s important to give credit where it’s due. All praise to:
- The Goddess who says nary a word when she catches me blogging instead of Writing;
- The Webmistresse, whose redoubtable webskills made the site a reality;
- the generous Dara McNaught at the New Zealand Writers Guild whose suggestion of a website was seized on by someone desperate to avoid Writing; and
- you Readers, all five of you, for making my visitor stats look good, and providing the occasional but welcome break from the email- and comment-spam.
Jesus loves you.
Needs Must and All That
Danny Stack‘s latest Story Vault about dramatic need, along with Jane Espenson‘s post on the need for story/character stakes, got me thinking.
My path to film analysis was as follows:
- blind acceptance –
Okay. She has to go back into the house for the cat because she loves widdle Ferdie.
- followed by a curious questioning –
But why would the previously right-thinking Bindy go back into the house she’s just escaped from? Shaka the left-handed half-blind machete surgeon IS STILL IN THERE!
- until I realised that there was a correlation between the VCR counter and such out-of-character behaviour –
[With 0:62:25 elapsed and 0:28:42 remaining] Bindy has yet to run Shaka through the bandsaw, detonate the C4 in the basement, and have a topless clinch with Chad the newspaper boy*.
It was likely after a three-hour-long (subjective) ninety-minute film that I had my I could’ve done better’n that moment and, still in that bubble of complete and utter naivete, started plotting my ideal action film:
- Draft one:
The Hero’s dog is killed. Vengeance is sought. A helpful dog joins our Hero as the Sidekick on his journey. The Baddies are vanquished. The Sidekick is adopted.
- Hm. Draft three:
The Hero’s family is massacred. Vengeance is sought. A helpful Waif joins our Hero in his quest. The Waif is kidnapped by the Baddies but not killed. The Baddies are pulped. One. By. One. The Hero rescues the Waif and they kiss.
- Meh. Draft fifteen:
The Hero’s family is threatened – there’s a close call involving the Baby. The Hero and his Plucky Family hit the road but the Baddies are always a step behind. The Hero’s Dog is revealed to be a mole. The Hero is conflicted but is interrupted by an extended Woo-drenched firefight, at the end of which the Hero sacrifices himself for his Plucky Family – but is saved by a last-minute, redemptive and fatal act by his Dog.
I learnt an important lesson during those rewrites**: if I don’t make the reader care it’s just another exciting-but-quickly-forgotten carnival ride (or an excruciatingly interminable cuppa with your parents’ friends).
* How do I know all this? Because these scenes are in the trailer I’ve seen a dozen times already and they haven’t happened yet (although in this instance I’m going to be short-changed by Chad and Bindy sharing a chaste kiss before an abrupt end-credit-roll).
** I also learnt that reusing elements from earlier, discarded drafts is Writing Smarter.
Paper Trail
I’m a hoarder by nature. Pre-Goddess, I shifted flat innumerable times and each shift entailed a re-evaluation of my hoarding criteria. With each shift I held on to less and less. But what I held on to mattered. Or I couldn’t bring myself to part with. Either reason was good enough for me to schlep it around.
Amongst the clutter that I dragged around were reams of ideas and notes and bits of stories. Each story had an audit trail of previous iterations. I drew comfort from the fact that if whatever change I’d made in version x.y+1 didn’t pan out, I could go back to v.x.y, copy-and-paste what I needed, and continue with v.x.y+2.
I didn’t tell a soul about this. It smelt of eccentric writerly behaviour and I feared it might lead to some superstitious obsessive compulsive behaviour. And then DJ Ash gifted me a movie book, inside which was the following:
I like to have all the actual physical pages that I have done in front of me: all the drafts, and all the revisions, and all the markings on them. It gives me a sense of security; ie., ‘look at all these drafts you have done, you must be a very responsible person – now all you have to do is use your good taste and refine these pages’. – David Mamet, Some Freaks
And all was well in the Land of D.
New Cutie Honey
Found in a recent issue of the Australian Empire magazine – a TV-show-now-on-DVD:
“[New Cutie Honey] is as buxom as the puerile mind can imagine: her ‘super powers’ come from a device implanted in her bosoms, which when energised engage a transformation that shreds her clothes in numerous 360-degree slow-mo tracking shots. Momentarily naked, she is then reassembled into an array of lurid tight-fitting costumes as she shouts ‘Honey Flash!’.”
I am nothing. Nothing.
UPDATE: god I love this business.
Short and Sweet
I hate synopsising. I hate it. Hate it hate it hate it.
After however long of bitching and scratching and gnawing at ninety-plus pages of script, the last thing I want to do is be succinct about it. I’m all out of succinct after condensing working draft text like –
He draws and fires in one continuous movement, the action a blur even at twenty-four frames per second, and his opponent drops to one knee.
– into –
He fires.
Stinky Jim drops.
When asked to cram the past month or so’s work into a freaking convenient one- or two-pager, my first impulse is to shriek, You wanna synopsis?, snatching up any sort of writing surface – a book, a piece of paper scrap, the applicant’s forehead – and scrawling out –
One man’s journey of self-discovery.
I never act on my impulse because, upon being asked, I immediately and automatically answer: A synopsis? Sure!
… Sigh.
Careful What You Wish For
Fill yer hand, friend, and after a few seconds of blurred action and sharp noises, the cordite smoke lifts… and I’m the last man standing with a television concept I’d been sweet on for a few years.
Back at the saloon, I take a stool at the bar. Two-Fingered Frank serves up a double and, after the barest hesitation, leaves the milk bottle within reach. The shot goes down but I don’t taste it. I begin to pour another but then I stop. I turn the concept over in my hands. I remember the last time I saw it; the amount of work I put into it. I admire the craft and heart inherent and also remember working against seemingly innumerable constraints and frustrations. It was mine now – mine.
The following morning, I need hair of the dog and some several raw eggs before I’m on my way; it’s not until I’ve carefully shaved my tongue that I feel human again. Sunlight glints off something in my saddlebags. Before I realise it, the concept’s in my hands again. Only now do I feel its dead weight. I may be the one-and-only now but it’s been years since I was in that space. After years of wading around in ninety minute-plus stories, packing a decent story into forty-five minutes with beats to match opening credit sequences and commercial breaks is a different beast to tame. And don’t forget story and character arcs to be entwined and paced over thirteen episodes.
When your major television influences include The Wire, Battlestar Galactica, Bodies and, of course, The Shield, you’ve set yourself a freakin’ high bar, friend.
Movement in the corner of my eye and I draw instinctively, ballpoint steady, elbow nice and relaxed. It’s only my reflection in the mirror. Gone is yesteryear’s cocky inkslinger, replaced with a wary, slightly squinty, keypuncher.
So be it.
What’s the point of aiming high if you can’t just shoot for the moon?
The Actual Writing – Part Two
The moment of glibness having passed, I remembered James Cameron‘s superb description of the process in the introduction to his 1993 scriptment of Strange Days:
I find the writing follows a logarithmic curve. Plotted against time, the curve is almost flat at first, then curves upward until it is nearly vertical.
I offer this not as an excuse but as a possible explanation of how I write.
I’d like to think I’m a regular kind of writer – y’know, bang out five/ten/whatever pages of script per day, no matter how long it takes, come family crisis or no. But try as I might, I’m not that kind of writer. (Nor would my family allow it.) I have to set aside a fixed number of hours per day to write. Sometimes they’re productive, sometimes they’re not. What’s important, for better or worse, is that I have the time to be creative. I need the discipline.
My first feature script followed that curve for the most part. Well, it would if you saw it from the far end of the room; up close, the peaks and valleys leading up to The Big Upward Curve represented the failed attempts to turn it first into a novel, then a comic. It was a combination of extreme boredom and some depression that put me onto screenplays. Everything clicked. It was game on.
After missing a couple of self-imposed deadlines, and in the lead-up to a Meaningful Birthday, there was a blurry month – this was pre-Goddess – where full-time work took up a third of the day, and the remaining waking hours were spent hunched over a keyboard. And then, for the first time, I got to type in the magic words:
Screenplay
by
D F Mamea
It felt good.
Still does, each time I get there.
The Actual Writing
I have no hard and fast way of writing. There is always a deadline to meet. Everything else depends. My general approach is as follows:
- write at full speed in a glorious blaze of early enthusiasm;
- run out of enthusiasm and squeeze out little gobbets of this and that;
- hit a writing block and, in an attempt to be inspired, shoot anything that moves;
- panic when iCal reminds me of looming deadline;
- freak out wife and kids by working seventy-two-hours straight to deliver to deadline.
Hahaha, just kidding. (See also this writing process.) (Okay, maybe I did it a couple of times, and maybe The Goddess came down and pointed out what a health and safety hazard I was.)
But that’s pretty much how it goes.
Point and Click
Cruisin’… cruuuisin’… cruuuisiiiin’…
- Just discovered the gorgeously effervescent Julie Goes to Hollywood, previously Things They Don’t Tell You in Film School, whose Bunuelesque observations on Juliewood, California have to be read to be believed. Meet her here; see her here.
- James Moran at the pen is mightier than the spork has an interesting blow-by-blow account of his rise and rise as a screenwriter, from getting an agent through to a finished product.
- James Henry joins the blogroll because of his impeccable taste in comics. And he’s a Green Wing-er. (Fedora-tip to Danny Stack.)
- The Writers’ Guild of Great Britain have a blog where the posts aren’t just parochial – you’re as likely to hear about why Hollywood neglects women as the juicy possibility that the BBC is planning a producers academy. RSS feeds are, like, just so cool.
- Helen Leggatt has an entertaining and illuminating blog, A Brit in the Boonies, on life as a Pom immigrant on the Cantabrian plains. I recommend her plum jam recipe.
- Donna of Mike and Donna’s Adventures fame has been busy. Mike’s travels provide proof that real life will always be much crazier than whatever fevered imagination can provide.