Week 10 -- Story Telling

What have I learned about writing this week?

I just got feedback on my first pages, and yes, it was a complicated set.

Rewriting is no joke. The first draft of anything is usually one of the toughest hurdles. At that point, nothing is on the paper yet, and so you have to offer yourself a lot of material in order to work with. Writing is somewhat like working with clay, you mold it over time, rarely does it form into a perfect piece of pottery in one instance -- maybe it does.

Writers have to be willing with their work. It took Christopher Nolan nearly ten years to write out Inception, and still, there may have been opportunities for ironing things out. The frame of mind I like to take to art is: "What can I do to take this to its best level?" I like to think in terms of best, not perfect, good, or satisfactory, but best.

What I realize at this point about my own writing is that I have acquired much density with my words. I don't know if I can entirely avoid this. Last semester in short story writing, one of my critique partners consistently commented on how they were fascinated by my mind and the dynamite characters I created. However, at times... they got lost. But if I explained just a little -- everything became clear. I'm learning how to do a balancing act here. I speak generally with more than one or two meanings in writing. I've gotten a knack for layering. This layering is not only in my prose, but it's starting to appear in my screenwriting. This could be in my favor because it could help to make my language more concise, on the flip side, it could be making things more complicated than need be.

That's the thing, I enjoy complicated stories. They put a high level of degree on setting things up so that in the end the payoff has to be high too. If the payoff doesn't meet the mark, I'm disappointed. I can see clearly that I am setting myself up pretty high, and I don't expect to meet the mark the first couple of runs. I believe Steven King is right in that good writing is like an excavation, you have to carefully take the dinosaur bones out of the ground or else it all falls apart and you won't know how its all connected. With the wrong frame of mind, writing any story could be a disaster. But, if I take my time and really invest in knowing my characters, story world, and series of plots, than I think I will know how they are suppose to flow and most importantly, I'll know how to best serve them.

I like the subject matter that comes out of my mind. I will admit I have some pride in that I come up with some fairly intriguing magical stories. I think fantasy is one of the greatest places to showcase Campbell's steps to a hero's journey. Myth making is intended to be esoteric, to be larger than life, and to be exciting. What's the point of retelling anything if it has absolutely no redeeming emotional quality to it? Is there anything worse than boredom in storytelling?

I think not.

But I do want what's best for a story. I think in finding what is best for a story, the audience ends up feeling appreciated. And more important than money, they feel as if their time was well spent.