Posts Tagged ‘great gatsby

04
Jun
13

A Post About Creative Limitation

STRAIGHT_JACKET_BOTHOn Saturday night I got into a discussion with a group of aspiring writers I met through the Get Smarter Creative Writing course about the idea of creative limitation.

They asked me to write up some of my views on the topic on the FB page we’ve started, but instead I thought I’d go one better and bang it out here for other aspiring writers to possibly benefit from.

Before I get started though, it’s only fair that I issue the following disclaimer: I don’t have all the answers. I’m only posting this because I’ve found this information useful in terms of my writing so yeah, eat the fish, spit the bones.

One of the biggest challenges I’ve encountered in writing fiction is losing direction, momentum and the will to finish what I start. What started out as a great premise for a novel unwinds into this sprawling mess of characters doing whatever the hell they want while the original story I had in mind forks so many times I end up getting forked.

After reading a lot of books and websites about writing I soon learned that the problem I was having was due to the fact that I was writing without structure.

 

 

The first time someone pointed this out to me, I balked at the idea. I’m not an architect, I’m a writer goddamnit! What the hell do I need structure for? 

As a creative person, I saw structure as a kind of death knell for my creativity because it stood to reason that the minute I took this brilliant idea I had for a novel / comic book / TV series / movie and tried to impose structure on it, surely I would end up severely limiting the idea?

The short answer here is yes. That’s exactly what structure does and lemme tell you something, reigning in that crazy basterd of an idea you have boiling in your mind is possibly the best thing you can do for it.

This is what I mean when I refer to the term creative limitation. It seems totally counter-intuitive to any creatively-minded person that you would actively try to limit your idea, cut it down to size, force it into a workable structure, but the act of doing so is one of the most valuable things you can do for your burgeoning story.

 

 

For starters, here’s a fun exercise to infuriate the shit out of you – explain your entire novel in one sentence, two at the most. Do it now. Take a pen write it down.

Impossible, right? Anyone who can successfully do that must be writing the most boring, over-simplified piece of fiction in the history of literature.

And yet every single novel ever written can be summed up in a sentence or two. What’s even more interesting to note is how many of those sentences are loaded to the gills with irony.

Take The Great Gatsby for example: A mysterious millionaire and hopeless romantic dedicates his life to winning the love of a shallow and self-absorbed woman.

We immediately know from reading that description that this is a story that will not end well. It also piques our curiosity as to how this could play out.

 

 

See, irony has this uncanny way of taking what would otherwise be a very straightforward plot and adding that crucial twist that all of a sudden makes people sit up and listen.

Say you do this exercise and come out with something like: “A young woman turns her back on her urban lifestyle when she marries a quiet woodsman and moves into the wilderness to live with him.”

It’s a good start. I’d be mildly interested to find out how these two polar opposites get along, but in all likelihood I’d probably shrug it off and carry on with my life.

BUT if you subtly tweaked the line to read, “A young ex-drug addict turns her back on her hedonistic urban lifestyle when she marries a quiet woodsman only to discover that his cabin is a front for the biggest crystal meth lab south of the border” THEN you’d have a compelling story.

 

 

I stole this technique from scriptwriting. In the movie industry they call this shortened description of your story a “logline” and it’s the single most important part of any screenplay.

The reason why is simple. If you’re pitching a screenplay, you have to be able to describe it in a sentence or two because movie producers receive a boatload of scripts from unknown writers every day and unless yours stands out from the rest and can be communicated succinctly, you are dead in the water.

In this way, movie producers are much the same as publishers. You need to make sure the idea you have for a novel is so awesome that just by explaining it with one sentence, you already have your reader / listener’s rapt attention.

So, for brevity’s sake, I’m going to stop this post there, at the logline. Focus on getting that crucial aspect of your story right and next week we can move onto the basic principles of structure according to archetypal story-telling which has remained pretty much unchanged since Homer first picked up pen (quill?) and paper.

Until then Winking smile

-ST

27
Sep
10

The Tiger Loses At SA Blog Awards, Drops Trou

What can I say guys? I failed you. I failed you all and I’m a lousy, good-for-nothing faily-failure who gets right to the finish line and then fails.

I coulda had class. I coulda been a contender. I coulda been somebody, instead of a bum, which is what I am, let’s face it…

 

 

I mean things started out well enough. J-Rab and I got all suited up and hit the One & Only for the pre-drinks at 5.30, made some pleasant chit chat with the people there and took sneaky hits off my tartan hip flask when no one was looking, on all counts it was a great start to the evening.

Oh, and did I mention that J-Rab looked smokin’ hot? You feel like the King of the world with that girl on your arm, no shit. You walk in there head held high because you know you’ve got the hottest girl in the place and nothing and nobody can fuck with that.

 

 

From the pre-drinks we were ushered downstairs where the blog awards were taking place and given fucking mind-bendingly strong tequila cocktails that went down like a freight train. Naturally I had one or two to take the edge off my nerves and then possibly another one or two because I needed something to do with my hands.

Next thing I knew we were all being asked to take our seats for the awards to begin which they did with an opening address by JP Naude that stressed a number of points to make the poor guy look better in the face of all the accusations being levelled at him that the nomination and voting procedures for this year’s awards were retarded.

Personally I couldn’t give a rat’s ass. I got to the final two in my category so I was happy.

The highlight of my evening was our Honourable Premier Lady Z’s speech she made at the awards. She’s a great public speaker and was actually really funny too which I wasn’t expecting at all.

 

 

Then came intermission during which J-Rab turned to me and in no uncertain terms said, “Babe, if you win there’s no question about it, you’ve got to go onstage and drop trou.”

“Huh. That’s a pretty crazy idea.”

“C’mon! You have to do it, this whole awards thing is so stuffy and boring. You have to drop trou if you win!”

“Lemme have a tequila and think about that…”

(3 tequilas later)

“Fuck! You’re a genius! I’m SO dropping trou when I win that fucking award! Ah man, this’s gonna be PRICELESS!”

“Atta boy!”

“I even practised in the bathroom, getting my jeans off, this is gonna be AMAZING!”

 

 

And so I marched purposefully back to my seat, really happy that I’d girded my loins with my “Tiger Scants” when I was suiting up earlier (the Tiger Scants are very sexy black undies with a growling Tiger’s face right where your junk sits).

I think there’s only one other pair of undies more badass than the Tiger Scants, but they’ve been universally banned because they killed a subway full of people with their sheer awesomnity.

I was ready. I was going to do it. I was going to unleash the Tiger and I already had four people waiting to give me a standing ovation as soon as my jeans hit the stage.

But yeah, in a profound Sad Trombone moment they didn’t read the name of SlickTiger that night, no, they read the name of Brainwavez and your poor buddy ol’ pal Slick’s hopes and dreams were shattered against the jagged, rocky shoreline of reality where he isn’t the blogging demigod he thinks he is.

He’s just a man with a clunky laptop banging out fightin’ words, a crazy man, maybe one day a great man, but not today.

 

 

From there things got a little blurry, but the anti-climax of not being able to drop trou onstage proved too much for me to bear so I spent the rest of the evening dropping my jeans at any given opportunity and “unleashing the Tiger” to large groups of unsuspecting people who reacted in much the same way they would had I unleashed a real tiger.

On that note, if anyone out there on the interwebs manages to unearth pictures of me “unleashing the Tiger” or just any pictures of me and J-Rab at the awards, I’ll reward you handsomely for your efforts by posting the pics IMMEDIATELY and writing a humorous limerick about you that you can show your friends.

Needless to say, we didn’t stick around for long after the awards. I could sense I was dangerously close to committing the kind of Tiger faux pas that gets you tarred and feathered in blogging circles. So we caught a taxi to The Fez instead and boogied on down with some of my closest and oldest friends who consoled me with drinks, pats on the back and kind words like “Fuck those fucking fuckheads man! You did good dude, you got the the top 2 IN THE COUNTRY! I mean that’s fucking impressive, that’s th – wait, are you even listening to me? Oh Christ, the tiger underpants again…”

To sum up, I’d like to quote one of my favourite novels of all time:

It eluded us then, but that’s no matter – tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms further… And one fine morning –

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

This is not the end.

-ST