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Pen Densham is RIDING THE ALLIGATOR

September 6, 2010 in Announcements, Articles, Lesly's Reviews - leave a reply

Fabulous writer Pen Densham has written a fabulous book about writing!  It’s called RIDING THE ALLIGATOR – Strategies for a Career in Screenplay Writing . . . and Not Getting Eaten.  It will come out at the end of the year.  You can read a chapter from it in advance by clicking the link above. 

Naturally, I think a LOT of it has EVERYTHING to do with acting.  Here are some of my fave passages:  

“Imagination is more important than knowledge. For while kowledge defines all we currently know and understand, imagination points to all we might yet discover and create.”  Albert Einstein

. . . if you are a violin, no matter how much those who influence you try to force you to sound like a bass drum, it isn’t going to sound right or bring you any satisfaction. It will cause you to lose faith in your creative value. I believe the true joy is to find what instrument you are through experimentation, and then give yourself to playing that instrument in relationship to your natural talent.
 
. . . we often depress ourselves when we look at what others have accomplished. Their script, book, movie, or sculpture seems so complete and certain.
 
. . . It’s nuts to berate ourselves as bad navigators when we don’t know where we are going until we’ve discovered it. When inventing the lightbulb, Thomas Edison said, as he went through more than four thousand variations, that he “ached to give it all up.”  Creativity is work. It would be misleading to say that stress and doubt are not normal.  
. . . artists who see their paths as challenging and adventurous look forward to the experience. The ones who interpret their journey as fearful and uncertain get creeped-out.
 
. . . What happens when we say we “are going to think about something”? We place a concept in our mind and wait for it to pop out again, changed. It’s like it’s tossed beneath the waters of our consciousness into a deep, unviewable sea. Occasionally it will surface on a wave in our brain only to vanish again. Then, sometimes it seems to land on a mental beach, with each wave bringing in a greater bounty of ideas or solutions. When we create, we encourage a dialogue with our subconscious. Sometimes the output can make us feel as if we are channeling, almost as if taking dictation from within. Other times we will collect odds and ends of ideas and then try to piece them together. There is no wrong way.
 
. . . “bi-association,” the joining together of two old forms to create a new one. Jaws in outer space? This is a bi-association that could be called Alien. Dinosaurs in modern America? You could call this Jurassic Park. Star Wars is akin to Robin Hood in the future. What about Casablanca on Mars?
 
. . . IF WE ARE INVENTING SOMETHING “NEW,” SHOULDN’T IT BE TOTALLY ORIGINAL? Strangely, the answer is no. Most great ideas are evolutions of earlier concepts. It’s referred to as “building on the shoulders of others.” Creativity reinvents the world. Great leaps forward are often accomplished by systemically borrowing from the best, or most interesting, existing successes and then adding your own inner magic. If there are only seven natural plots, then all literature is built on their shoulders.
 
. . . the “shoebox” method. Take as much time as you like making notes about your theme on cards or Post-Its, and dump them as you go into a handy container, the shoebox. When you intuitively feel ready, sort the notes out on a bulletin board or across a floor. It is a powerful visual and physical aid to finding and organizing your plot characters and events quickly. I have sampled many software systems, searching for the perfect idea organizer: Mind Mappers, Outliners, Carding Programs, and commercial Plot Developers. I would love to find a simple system that worked the way my brain does. Most companies will let you download and test-drive their programs for free. Try them; maybe you will be lucky. I still make lists and use cards when possible. At Trilogy, we liken carding out a new story as a voyage into the unknown. We call our major plot points “Islands of Sanity.” We need surprisingly few Islands of Sanity to create a whole feature plot.

LK:  To me, this is like your scripts.  You don’t need to start out understanding how to do the whole script or the whole scene right away.  As you go through it you go, “Oh, yah. She hates Mrs. Gulch and wants to get out of Kansas.”  Or, “Oh look!  That’s a three!  I can do that.”  “Islands of Sanity.” I like it.

Movie scripts are really short stories, not novels. Scripts may be 90 to 120 pages, but there is a surprising amount of unused white space on those pages. If you scraped together all the words in a script to read like prose, I estimate there would only be forty to seventy pages. If we discover and lay out most of the key Island landing points along the way to complete the structure, it is easier to grasp the journey. Even though I have not answered every question, the work goes forward. We begin joining the dots as ideas come to fill in the spaces.
 
Yup — just like our script work!  

. . . I try never to face a blank page.
 
Read: “I am never panicked by a new script.”  
 
. . . Slowly, I assemble a script-like “thing,” without making the process exacting or refined. This process is similar to a painter making pencil sketches before switching to the oils; it is easy to erase and change sections.
 
. . . I write with no effort to put it into a proper script format. I try to stay loose and uncritical: a couple of lines of dialogue here, a scene description there, a cool action beat. I leave a few other files, or sheaves of Stickies with notes, open on my computer to keep tabs on things that don’t fit yet.
 
. . . MURDER YOUR INTERNAL CRITIC. All writers have them — inner voices that rant and rage at our efforts. Mine floats behind my left shoulder and can be a real jerk. I have never found that voice in my head to be an accurate beacon of what I am accomplishing. So my advice is to try to devise a method of ignoring your doubts. I have heard that some artists have an internal discussion with their critical voice. They have succeeded in damping it down by asking it to take a break until they have finished the material.
 
. . . I found this great note on the Internet one day, written by Andrew Cavanagh:

Eliminate “Writer’s Block” Forever

Secret #1 to writing: This will sound bad I know but stick with me here… Take the attitude you’re going to write ANY OLD CRAP on the subject that you can come up with. Whatever you think of — just write it down. Any old nonsense — GREAT. Just put it on paper (or onto
your screen). A pile of steaming crap no one would ever read? Not your problem — just write it anyway. Just fill up pages and pages with any old crap and keep writing straight off the top of your head for as long as you can. Stop thinking about it and just do it.

Now if you follow secret no 1 you’re going to be surprised.

The biggest mistake most writers make is that they confuse the creative process with the critical process. When you’re setting out to write something you’re in the creative process. I’ve written full books in 7 days. But that can’t happen if you’re constantly worrying about how good, bad, or accurate what you’re writing is. You’re in the creative process. Let your creative side come out by disengaging your critical process.

If I’m writing any old crap then my critical side has no work to do. I know it’s crap already.
 
After years of writing I began to notice “any old crap” is often pretty good. . . . That’s the first bonus. . . . But you might say “What if it’s not good? What if any old crap really is crap?!” And that leads us to secret no 2 — the biggest secret of great writing.

Secret # 2 — Great writing is all about REWRITING.

Once you have something to work with it’s really easy to work it over and polish it so it shines. It is far easier to add to a piece of writing you’ve already done. It’s far easier to edit writing you’ve already done so it flows better. But it’s very hard to look at a blank screen and write something brilliant from scratch. So write any old crap then rewrite it till it sparkles. Easy. (For more tips on copywriting and eliminating writer’s block by Andrew Cavanagh, go to: http://www.copywriting1.com/2007/03/eliminate-writers-block-forever.html.)

. . . we are happiest and most productive when we are working from our true nature and not trying to guess and fake what someone else wants.  As I said, I have taken on projects that were against my nature. And it literally felt like I was having to pluck the words from my flesh to get those damn things out of me.

. . . IF IT DOESN’T GET MADE, DID I FAIL?
 
Or, if I didn’t get the job, I failed, right?

Most scripts don’t sell just as most actors don’t get jobs from their auditions. But, frequently, something good comes to gift the effort. People may love the work and invite you to write about a project they envisage, or ask to review other scripts you have. Effort brings opportunity.
 
. . . An unsold script is not a waste; it is part of the psychic structure that is helping you develop as an artist.
 
. . . When we first came to Hollywood, John Watson and I took the marketing analysis people from Universal Studios to lunch. We asked, based on their research, what kind of movies were most wanted by the audience? The answer was “new, interesting, and different!” But movies at that level of novelty were very scary for the studio executives because there were no precedents to justify the risk. It is much safer to keep your job making a sequel to an old hit, or buying the rights to an old TV show or video game or comic book hero. Treading new ground requires courage and vision.

This is why studios are often only taken into the future kicking and screaming. The story goes that Fox Studios, fearing it had a stinker on its hands, was trying to sell off Star Wars to an investor as a tax break until the day it opened. The studio just didn’t know how to quantify it. A similar story about American Graffiti is told that the executive at Universal felt that George Lucas had “f##ked him” when he first saw the finished film, a film that cost one million dollars back then, and went on to gross one hundred million dollars once it got released. In this day of corporate-run studios, original ideas are even harder to sell.
 
. . . You are guaranteed a 100% failure rate if you never try. I have seldom been damaged much by the things I attempted to do or that didn’t go right.