Month: June 2014

Take Notes, Take Notes, Take Notes

Written by Brendan O’Meara

I was listening to The Moment with Brian Koppelman. It’s a great podcast for screenwriters, but also creatives in any genre. The principles of creativity are the same across all disciplines. First and foremost: get your ass in the seat and work. Don’t be a little shit like I was in this post. I could delete that post and pretend it never existed, but that would be dishonest and weak. Own it, yo.

What Koppleman and John Hamburg talked about in an earlier episode of The Moment was finding a movie (could be a book, essay, etc.) that inspires you. Take your favorite movie and get a notebook. Take notes throughout the whole movie. Pause the movie. Watch the movie five, six, seven times. What works? How did the director lay out the scenes? How did he sew them together? How does the dialogue work? The list goes on and on.

I’ve watched The Dark Knight probably 15 times. I’ve watched the ending to The Dark Knight probably 50 times. It sums up everything about the movie beautifully. The movie, in many ways, is about duality. “You either die a hero, or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain.” It’s illustrated in Two Face. It’s illustrated in the Batman v. Joker rivalry. It’s in the duality of Batman v. Bruce Wayne. Everything has its dipoles in this movie, positive and negative components of a magnet.

In the ending of The Dark Knight, Jim Gordon says of Harvey Dent (covering up the mess Dent made), “A hero, not the hero we deserved but the hero we needed.” Then as Batman runs into the night Gordon says, “Because he’s the hero Gotham deserves, but not the one it needs right now.” I love how Christopher Nolan and Jonathan Nolan flipped the wording. Again with the duality. The past and present tense. (It’s also classic Christopher Nolan cross-cutting.)

Whatever the creative medium, if you’re serious about your art, you stand on the shoulders of titans before you and you examine the what the why of their work. Football head coaches watch hours and hours and hours of game film, why? They’re trying to understand the inner workings of an opponent. In art there are no opponents, but the same measure of examination is imperative to those serious about the art.

I think The Great Gatsby is THE model of first-person storytelling. I’ve read it six times, but never with a notebook. When I read it again I’m going to peel back its facade to the scaffolding underneath. I recommend this to anyone, for anyone.

It’s the dirty work that goes unseen.

Brian Koppelman on rejection and writing habits

Written by Brendan O’Meara

This was a great listen, so much so that I’ve listened to it twice.

Brian Koppelman, screenwriter/director to several movies including Rounders and The Illusionist, spoke with Tim Ferriss, author of the 4-Hour Work Week and 4-Hour Body, on the Tim Ferriss Show.

Koppelman talks about rejection and powering through it all. Before he reached the level he’s at now he spent two hours every morning working on a screenplay with his writing partner. That screenplay was Rounders. He made the time. This speaks to many of creatives that may have a day job for the steady income while working on our passion projects.

And in this crazy modern world we live in, I tweeted out to Koppelman just to say how much I appreciated his insights. He replied and retweeted. Pretty cool for a guy in the big time.

Click here to listen to the interview.

My Top Writing Books

Written by Brendan O’Meara

Writing books may as well be writing procrastination books. There’s a big market in writing procrastination and writers capitalize on it. That’s the dream of every writer: to get to a point where he/she is reputable enough to write a book on writing. He/she knows there’s a new generation of saps looking to put off their writing by learning a new tip from the incumbent writer emeritus. I’m a sap that says, “No, it’s continuing education.” Which it is, but there’s no better way to become more skilled than to put the pencil to the paper.

There really is only one tip: write like it’s a job (because if you’re serious about it, it is). Or, more bluntly, write like a mofo. (How great is Cheryl Strayed?)

Hemingway didn’t even know he wrote a book on writing, which makes his one of the very best. It’s titled: Ernest Hemingway on Writing, Edited by Larry W. Phillips. One my faves. Tons of great nuggets from letters to friends. He had a social network where they shared tools, tricks, and insights. They helped each other.

Stephen King doesn’t get enough credit for being a great writer (Have you read Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption?). His book On Writing is excellent. Buy it.

The New New Journalism by Robert S. Boynton is a series of interviews with great narrative journalists. They talk about writing and reporting. I reference it all the time.

Roy Peter Clark’s Writing Tools is the best of his many books on writing. If you can get ahold of his laminated Writing Tools Quick Sheet, do it. It’s like being an NFL head coach holding a laminated card like Andy Reid.

Good Prose by Tracy Kidder and Richard Todd is a wonderful collaborative book between a writer/editor tandem. I reviewed it here.

Lastly, Creative Nonfiction by Philip Gerard lays out what it takes to do great reporting and writing to make a work of nonfiction read like great fiction.

Well, that’s it. I hope these books help. Got some others? Throw them in the comments.

Honorable Mention:

Bird by Bird, Anne Lamott

On Writing Well, William Zinsser

Glamour of Grammar, Roy Peter Clark

How to Write Short, Roy Peter Clark

Help! for Writers, Roy Peter Clark

Do Cool Stuff: The Key to Being a Writer

Written by Brendan O’Meara

My big writer’s resolution of 2014 was to do more immersion projects. I stopped covering high school games. I’ve covered hundreds upon hundreds of games. They’re not worth my time any more in a very small media market.

The best thing any writer can do is to do interesting things (or do things the writer finds interesting). The technical skills that come with writing comes with repetition.

The literary agent Jeff Kleinman visited Goucher College one summer residency. This was in 2007. He rattled a lot of cages for harping on the MFA program for producing what he loathes: the MFA Voice. The MFA Voice is subjective, of course, but it’s a voice that is technically sounds but almost always devoid of energy, spunk, and edge. It’s a voice that is bogged down by fundamentals, that’s too aware of itself, that doesn’t want to get in the way of the story. It can be very vanilla. Take movies. You know when you’re watching a Wed Anderson, a Christopher Nolan, a Stephen Spielberg, a Quentin Tarantino. That’s voice.  We want to occupy their brain space for two to three hours at a time.

Certain stories that are very heavy need the author to step back, but for most stories, especially memoir, the voice has to be engaging and full of energy. The key, as Austin Kleon writes in his great book Show Your Work, is to “Be an Amateur.”

Amateurs are not afraid to make mistakes or look ridiculous in public. They’re in love, so they don’t hesitate to do work that others think of as silly or just plain stupid.

That’s what Jonathan Safran Foer did when he wrote Everything is Illuminated. He wrote like an amateur. In Malcolm Gladwell’s What the Dog Saw, Gladwell wrote a great piece on late bloomers (Foer is not a late bloomer, but the other side of the coin). Foer brought an amateur approach to his writing. He was a freshman at Princeton (smaht kid, as we say in the Boston area). On a whim, he took a creative writing class with Joyce Carol Oates. Gladwell wrote:

Oates told him that he had the most important of writerly qualities, which was energy. He had been writing fifteen pages a week for that class, an entire story for each seminar.

“Why does a dam with a crack in it leak so much?” [Foer] said with a laugh. “There was just something in me, there was like a pressure.”

Foer went to Ukraine to see where his grandfather came from (doing cool stuff). He came back. Foer said:

I was just writing. I didn’t know that I was writing until it was happening. I didn’t go with the intention of writing a book. I wrote three hundred pages in ten weeks. I really wrote. I’d never done it like that.

This is the type of thing that gets a bit smothered in the MFA crowd, a crowd that gets bitter when their technically sound prose can’t find a home. It’s like what Kleinman told me once, “It doesn’t matter how great a writer you are if you’re not writing anything people want to read.”

I’m writing about maple syrup these days. It’s cool. It’s about syrup, but it’s also about my fleeting sense of manhood and a search for brotherhood. Anyway, go ahead and watch some sap dump into the holding tank. I think it’s interesting.