that famed intelligence is just a little slow.
One year ago: I investigate UN peacekeeping missions. (And I have morning sickness, though you don't know that yet.)
Two years ago: I attend Tiffany's bridal shower.
Three years ago: We see Spawn.
Four years ago: I have jitters about moving to LA.
Why I Write Movies, Part I
A long time ago, my friends and I were all writing novels. Novels about young, hip, technokids. The Douglas Coupland genre, before Douglas Coupland had done it -- basically, we wanted to do Microserfs about 6 to 8 years before he did it. Mine was The Go-Go Kids, Marq's was Confessions of a Plastic Play Doll. (I could explain where that title came from, but I'd really rather not.)
I would start with a situation and some characters, and I'd write, and write, and write, and it would be all very amusing and all very well-written, if I don't mind saying so myself (I don't), but it wouldn't go anywhere. That's how my writing always was.
I analyzed novels. I read books on writing. I took classes on writing. And I still couldn't figure out how you wrote a novel. What a plot was. What a story was. And what the hell the difference was between plot and story.
I took several quarters of classes in Novel Writing taught by Floyd Salas at Foothill College. Floyd was a great guy, had incredibly enthusiasm for the art of fiction writing, and had written a couple of novels himself. Two things became immediately clear after sitting through his class a few times: he had that gift of making anybody's writing better through a few simple techniques, and he did not know how to write a novel.
Floyd's best known book was Tattoo the Wicked Cross (which we were supposed to buy for class and never did). He described writing it as writing one short story, then another, then another, and put all together they made a novel.
I was pretty sure that was not how novels were written.
(I guess I lose intelligence points for not being able to figure this out for myself, but...one thing I've discovered is, while most people can recognize what a story is, hardly anyone knows how to tell you how to create one or what makes a story a story.)
At the same time -- this is all about a decade ago -- I was also interested in movies. I'd always been interested in movies, of course -- I went to see them constantly, I could talk about them endlessly, I'd read every book about movies I could lay my hands on. But movies seemed to be other in a way novels were not. Anyone could write a novel; movies were specialized.
Except at this point they weren't. There had been the gigantic spec script boom following the Writers Guild strike of...87? 88? Multi-million dollar spec sales were reported left and right. I know that screenplay writing was becoming mainstream enough of a topic for the San Jose Mercury News to refer to writing a screenplay as "the middle-class lottery."
Also, independent movies were getting better distribution and getting better known, like Richard Linklater's Slacker. Didn't have to be huge big-budget Hollywood spectaculars: anyone could do this.
I had joined the GEnie online service at some point, which had great resources for writers. One of their most thriving groups of writers were the screenwriters, who could talk endlessly about craft. One of the things I heard time and time again was, Screenplays are about story. As William Goldman had said oh-so-long-ago, Screenplays are structure. I was pretty sure I had the rest of the writing thing down: people liked my writing, my characters, my dialogue. All I was missing was story.
So, I thought, I will learn about this screenwriting thing, and through this streamlined, story-driven form, I will learn what a story is. I started taking screenwriting classes at De Anza. One of the best community colleges around for studying film, De Anza, was right near where I worked at Apple Computer. (By the way, I cannot stress highly enough what a wonderful thing the community college system is, which is probably why California's gone out of its way to kill it.)
I remember the first class, which was an overview of basic screenwriting techniques, including how to do an audio-visual screenplay. I didn't know it at the time, but De Anza is very big on training people to work in industrial video (and very successful at getting them work there).
The teacher in the class really liked my last piece, which was about ten minutes long. But I needed to work on the story some, to bring it to closure.
Great, what's that?
She couldn't tell me.
I took the next screenwriting class, taught by a guy who was a WGA member and wrote screenplays and this, that, and the other. I remember him talking about the importance of the opening -- I remember the opening of The Godfather quite clearly. We had to pitch ideas -- once, a student from San Francisco State's film program went on and on about some project having to do with a guy being very interested in a woman's shoes (it was an experimental poetry piece). He got very upset at being told he had no story. He stormed out, as I recall.
The teacher could tell us we had no story. He could not tell us how to discover the story. Or how to check for story-ness ourselves.
But I was enjoying immersing myself in filmmaking. De Anza has a thriving hive of film students. If you're interested in film and you live on the Peninsula, De Anza is the place for you. Lots of equipment -- Stanford and San Francisco State students slummed there all the time because they could get their hands on the equipment at De Anza but not at their own schools -- and encouragement and competition and...I began to take classes in filmmaking and... I'll tell you about that next time.
I got 5 pages critiqued in tonight's class. Lots of good feedback, including a fair amount of praise! I forced myself to write down all the positive comments, because I am in the habit of just remembering the negatives.
Of course, no one's told me they want to read the book when it's finished. So I have found my dark cloud of doom.
So, the past few times I've been at Starbucks, I've had the same thing every time (an orange mocha chip frappucino) and the same thing has happened every time: I've had a, uh, Metamucil moment. As I suspect the chocolate flavor in the frappucino does not come from Ex-Lax (ooo, there's an image), is there any reason this might be happening? And no, it's not the time of day.
I heard on the radio that OSHA is checking out Space Mountain at Disneyland, because one of the cars came to a dead stop on the tracks. I was reminded suddenly of one of the great realizations I had as a teenager: that the Matterhorn and Space Mountain were, actually, roller-coasters.
I think I may have been in college, actually.
And yes, I'd been to other amusement parks and ridden other roller-coasters. I think it had to do with the whole fantasy I'd get into when I went to Disneyland (cha-ching! the marketing worked!), and so I didn't realize it was just another amusement park.
I think I may have been in college and was on a weekend roadtrip to Disneyland before the light finally dawned. IQ of 160+, and still very silly.
Have you had any stupid realizations?
And there's an interesting discussion about kids vs. no kids.
The answer to yesterday's question: Today is the tenth anniversary of Saddam Hussein's Iraqi army invading Kuwait, which gave us the Gulf War. You remember that. Of course.
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Copyright 2000 Diane Patterson
Send comments and questions to diane@nobody-knows-anything.com