E R I K V I D A L

RANDS IN REPOSE: How to Write a Book

I’m going to jump right to the punch line. I’m going to start by telling you exactly what you need to do in order to finally write that book you’ve been promising yourself for the past three years. Are you sitting down? Good.

Don’t write a book. Even better, stop thinking about writing a book. Your endless internal debate and self-conjured guilt about that book you haven’t written yet is a sensational waste of your time. My guess is if you took all the time that you’ve spent considering writing a book and translated that into actual writing time, you’d be a quarter of your way into writing that book you’re not writing.

So, stop. It’s the only sure-fire way to begin.

The Weight of Big Decisions

The theory about big decisions is that they require a tremendous amount of thought, and that investing in all this thought results in better decisions. There are many classes of decisions where there is a right move. Where deliberate planning around complex issues involving different people with varied goals is essential to making a correct decision.

Your unwritten book is not one of these decisions. Stop debating it.

I’m just about done with my book, Being Geek. This is my second book, so having gone through the process once before has given me experience that I am using for planning. There was an arc that I wanted to write about and a table of contents eventually did show up, but, by far, my most productive move regarding writing a book was — wait for it — writing.

A blank page. A scribble in a Moleskine. That tweet that captured your thought better than a chapter ever would. Quietly crossing out paragraphs you loved. These are the acts that comprise writing a book, not talking about it, not announcing that you’re going to do it, and certainly not reading an article by a blogger who at this very moment is procrastinating finishing his own book by writing about how you should start yours.

The Journey is the Book

There are scenarios where you’re going to want to plan the hell out of your book. If you’re writing the definitive medical book on the treatment of West Nile encephalitis, I would like to encourage you to plan the hell out of this book. These are books where the structure and the data are essential to this book’s success.

This is not the book that you are writing. In fact, if you’re a frequent reader of Rands in Repose, I would suggest that even if you have a book in mind, that is not the book you’d end up writing. Having done this twice now, I can confirm that the only part of my planning process that made it to the published work is the title.

It’s not that I ended up with an entirely different book than I intended. I wrote the book I intended to write, but the majority of the writing involved discovering ideas randomly, without planning, and in some of the strangest places. The following is the documentation of tools, strategies, and mind games I use to remove barriers and create a book.

>> To read the rest of the article at RANDS IN REPOSE click here

SCRIPTSHADOW: Five and a Half Screenplays You Don't Want to Write

This may sound like a shocking statement, but I believe anybody can be a screenwriter. Everybody in the world has at least one interesting story in them. Life is too crazy not to have an awesome story in the vault. But the reality is, it takes a shitload of time to learn how to *tell* that story in the bastardized format that is a “screenplay.” How long it takes generally depends on how talented you are. For some people it only takes a couple of years. For others, it may take two decades to figure out. So a lot of screenwriting comes down to perseverance and a willingness to learn.

I bring this up because every screenplay is kinda like a final exam. It’s a test of everything you’ve learned *up to that point.* So while you may ace that particular exam, it doesn’t mean you know everything about the subject. I guess an analogy would be, passing the bar proves you know a hell of a lot about the law, but it doesn’t mean you’re ready to try your case in the Supreme Court.

So what I thought I’d do is help you avoid some of the more common misguided screenplay attempts I see amateurs make. I wouldn’t say these scripts are easily avoidable because if they were, I’d see a lot less of them. But at least this way you can ask the question. “Am I about to write this script?” Or “Did I just write this script?” As long as you’re asking the question, you have a chance of salvaging the material. So below are five and a half types of bad amateur screenplays I keep running into.

 

THE TECHNICALLY PERFECT BUT ULTIMATELY BORING SCRIPT
This is a toughie. Even professional writers make this mistake and that’s because the line between technical and natural isn’t always easy to identify. However, these scripts usually come from writers who take the screenwriting books a little too literally and who outline every single beat of their story down to the commas. The main character has a clear goal. The act breaks come at the right time. The character motivations are strong. Twists and turns happen at just the right moments. And yet…and yet there’s something extremely boring about it all. Even if we don’t know what’s going to happen, nothing that happens is ever surprising to us. There’s no heart, no soul, no life in the screenplay. “A+” from Robert McKee and Blake Snyder. “F” from the reader.

How to avoid it: There are two main reasons these kinds of scripts happen. First, like I mentioned above, it happens when writers follow the rulebook too literally. If the reader can feel the beats of the story, if they can see the first act turn coming a mile away, if the midpoint is accompanied by a billboard, you’re not doing your job. Great writers learn that in addition to following the rules, it’s their job to MASK the rules, to cover them up so it all flows naturally. This is usually achieved by rewriting – going back into your story and smoothing out all those obvious technical beats. Second, you still have to make interesting choices. Giving your protagonist a goal is one of the most basic elements of storytelling there is. But that doesn’t mean any goal will work. In fact, 100 writers might come up with 100 different character goals. Your job is to beat out the other 99 writers and come up with the most interesting one. Take a movie like Back To The Future for instance. Imagine if once Marty got back to 1955, he didn’t have to get his mom and dad back together, but instead had to win a rock and roll contest at the high school. That choice would’ve made the movie way worse, right? So don’t just make choices, make bold and interesting choices. 

THE FAUX MASTERPIECE
I’m going to give credit for this one to Jim Mercurio. When he spoke of the “faux masterpiece,” he described it like this: “That’s when you try to tackle something huge like a critical piece of history – the Holocaust, slavery, World War II – or try to set an expensive politically-charged love story against that sort of backdrop. You might be a deep thinker and have an unparalleled understanding of the subject, but as a beginning writer, your craft is not going to be able to do the story justice.” I’d expand this definition to include huge Lord of The Rings like fantasy epics, or overlong sci-fi epics like Avatar. These “masterpieces” require so much skill it’s terrifying. They need to be historically accurate on everything from the dialect to the activities people do. It’s hard enough to build a couple of interesting characters into a script. These scripts require dozens of characters, all of whom are usually thin and boring. With these extra characters come extra subplots. Weaving these subplots in and out of the central plot requires a tremendous amount of know-how for even a 100 page screenplay. There may be 10 screenwriters on the planet who know how to do it for a script that’s 150 pages. These scripts also tend to require an inordinately massive goal to keep the story interesting for such a long period of time (i.e. William Wallace’s pursuit of freedom for an entire country in Braveheart; The Marines trying to destroy the Na’vi homeland in Avatar) which amateur writers almost never include. It’s basically everything that’s hard about screenwriting times a thousand. That’s why taking on an epic masterpiece is…well…an epic mistake.

How to avoid it: I honestly wouldn’t touch an epic unless you’ve written at least seven scripts or a few novels.

>> To read the rest of the article at SCRIPTSHADOW click here

TED TALK: DAVID BYRNE: How architecture helped music evolve

ROGER EBERT: The Quest for Frisson

The French word frisson describes something English has no better word for: a brief intense reaction, usually a feeling of excitement, recognition, or terror. It's often accompanied by a physical shudder, but not so much when you're web surfing.

You know how it happens. You're clicking here or clicking there, and suddenly you have the OMG moment. In recent days, for example, I felt frissons when learning that Gary Coleman had died, that most of the spilled oil was underwater, that Joe McGinness had moved in next to the Palins, that a group of priests' mistresses had started their own Facebook group, and that Bill Nye the Science Guy says "to prevent Computer Vision Syndrome, every 20 minutes, spend 20 seconds looking 20 feet away."

Oh, there were many more. A frisson can be quite a delight. The problem is, I seem to be spending way too much time these days in search of them. In an ideal world, I would sit down at my computer, do my work, and that would be that. In this world, I get entangled in surfing and an hour disappears.

Twitter is an enabler for this behavior. It provides a quiet, subtle pressure to tweet frissons, and be tweeted in return. A good tweet can involve a funny comment, a snarky one, or one so poetic I read it and marvel. It can contain breaking news. It can be a small autobiographical revelation. I enjoy this. Deprived of speech, I chatter all day on Twitter, and have virtual relationships with the carefully chosen Tweeters I follow. Some are great writers. Some are deep thinkers. Some keep me updated on American Idol. Some persist in updating the scores of sporting events. I hate that, except in a situation like the Blackhawks' winning season. I care about the Blackhawks, but not enough to watch. All I require is the frisson.

This is not in praise of Twitter. It has to do with the possibility that my brain--and yours too, since you are here--has been rewired by the internet. There's an article by Nicholas Carr in the new issue of Wired magazine about a UCLA professor who used an MRI scan to observe the brain activity of six volunteers. Three were web veterans, three were not. He found that veteran Web users had developed "distinctive neural pathways."

He asked his newbies to surf the web for six days, and then he repeated the experiment: "The new scans revealed that their brain activity had changed dramatically; it now resembled that of the veteran surfers." The article suggests this possibility: "When we go online, we enter an environment that promotes cursory reading, hurried and distracted thinking, and superficial learning. Even as the Internet grants us easy access to vast amounts of information, it is turning us into shallower thinkers, literally changing the structure of our brain."

In other words, instead of seeking substance, we're distractedly scurrying hither and yon, seeking frisson.

>> To read the rest of the article at ROGER EBERT click here