Jamie Jobb's Backstage Pass: Writers Writing About Writing

Bookend Rendezvous No. 2

What if books could slip under covers to swap stories?

This book report matches another pair of unknown titles,

– strangers to each other, until introduced here.

NOTE: Writers Writing About Writing may be a topic which appeals only to other scriveners, although sometimes readers may be surprised by what they find hiding in those professionally self-examined pages. Here we spotlight two stimulating books by writers about writing which may inspire a much wider readership.

* * *

Cell Baby at ARTU4iA 2015, artist unknown

Writers Writing

About Writing

by Jamie Jobb

Before a jazz program last year at our local music hall – where the 18-piece orchestra conspicuously outnumbered the audience – I chatted with another audient, a high school English teacher, who was lamenting the inability of his current students to read or write.

“They’re not interested,” he said. “It’s too easy for them to ‘Snapchat’ or ‘Instagram’ or ‘text’ – but not to actually read or write anything on paper!”

So in a world without readers, what’s the conscientious writer to do – particularly the writer tending toward fiction and/or dramatic works? Some of us choose to write for an audience who hears the text, rather than reading it.

In 1970s California, Marin County authors (myself included) hosted “writers block parties”. The joke was on ourselves. Nobody really had “writers block” because, as “freelancers”, we could Never Afford to Not Work. We were too busy making a living as writers without the steady income of staff positions. We were what’s now referred to as “gig workers”.

“Blocked” writers tend to be those driven by neither deadlines nor paychecks. They seem to have no back-pocket title to jump into when their one – and only one – project stalls.

Writers who gripe about “writers block” are more often seeking excuses for Not Writing Right Now. A writer working on more than one project at once can work any time – bypassing the stalled project to write where his momentum resides in that particular moment. And of course, a writer may be delayed by some not-yet-expressed notion from her muses, but that’s the eternal patience required of our craft.

Any writers who believe in their stage-writing potential could consider enrolling in a university which offers among its faculty a resident playwright or two. Indeed, “theatre professor” seems to be a primary career path for many renowned playwrights who – unlike screenwriters – are not known for Blockbuster Paydays.

Here’s an incomplete list of accomplished playwrights who have been employed by American universities seeking to attract bright young writing talent: David Henry Hwang and Charles L. Mee (Columbia), Paula Cizmar and Louis Alfaro (USC), Sarah Ruhl and Marsha Norman (Yale), Lynn Nottage (Columbia/Yale), Philip Kan Gotanda (UC Berkeley), Edward Albee (University of Houston), Wendy Wasserstein (Cornell), Rachel Dickstein (SUNY), Cheri Magid (NYU), María Irene Fornés (Brown), Rob Handel (Carnegie-Mellon), Charles Smith (Ohio University), Mary Zimmerman (Northwestern), Erik Ramsey (Northwestern/Ohio University), Paula Vogel (Cornell/Brown/Yale/UCLA), Anna Deavere Smith (NYU/USC/Stanford/Carnegie Mellon), David Mamet (Yale, NYU, Goddard College).

For writers with little interest and limited resources for collegiate pursuits, there’s always the library. Or a good bookstore. For our second “Bookend Rendezvous”, we’ll look at two books meant to spark the budding writer into purposeful florescence. Particularly a budding fiction writer seeking to grow dramatic roots.

* * *

“Writing Down The Bones”

Goldberg, Natalie:

Writing Down the Bones

Boston: Shambhala Press, 1986

By way of introduction to her illuminating 170-page tome, Natalie Goldberg states:

“This book is about writing. It is also about using writing as your practice, as a way to help you penetrate your life and become sane. What is said here about writing can be applied to running, painting, anything you love and have chosen to work with in your life.”

Author Goldberg is most concerned with the intra-personal chemistry of the craft: how a particular pen feels in the writer’s hand, where to sit in the coffee shop, how to write hot facts in cool comfort.

“When I teach a class, I want the students to be ‘writing down the bones’ – the essential, awake speech of their minds.”

Her book is structured not around chapters, but along a linear progression of solitary suggestions based on potent ideas, succinctly stated. Note her topic headings: “We Are Not The Poem”, “Man Eats Car”, “Don’t Marry The Fly”, “Fighting Tofu”, “A Tourist In Your Own Town”, “Writing is Not a McDonald’s Hamburger”, “One Plus One Equals a Mercedes Benz”. Goldberg obviously approaches blank pages based on her current frame of mind, and her feelings which always seem to be fleeting:

“I have found that when I am writing something emotional, I must write it the first time directly with hand on paper. Handwriting is more connected to the movement of the heart. Yet, when I tell stories, I go straight to the typewriter.”

For struggling beginners, Goldberg suggests a DIY timed exercise to “capture the oddities of your mind”. The exercise requires the writer to tackle a single topic for a randomly specified short period of time – using only pen and paper, while committing to these six rules:

1. Keep your hand moving.

2. Don’t cross out anything.

3. Don’t worry about spelling, punctuation, grammar.

4. Lose self-control.

5. Forget logic, don’t think.

6. Write about your own scary, naked truth(s).

Her book is a quick read and Goldberg slowly becomes, page-after-page, a real Pen Pal for any struggling writer who seeks straight-forward professional progress. Particularly the writer tangled up in blue and a temper turning mental. Her advice is sound and well rounded, although the entire book is written in that unfortunately annoying, apologies to Mike Krukow, Sporting-Announcer Second-Person Voice – (the “you” that is never “you” because “you” have no actual “curveball”!!!). Here are a few examples of Goldberg’s succinct scrimshaw-scribbled Bones:

“There is freedom in being a writer and writing. It is fulfilling your function. I used to think freedom meant doing whatever you want. It means knowing who you are, what you are supposed to be doing on this earth, and then simply doing it.”

Natalie Goldberg also understands that writers should consider themselves Service Workers as well as Struggling Artists:

“A responsibility of literature is to make people awake, present, alive. If the writer wanders, then the reader, too, will wander. The fly on the table might be part of the whole description of a restaurant. It might be appropriate to tell precisely the sandwich that is just walked over, but there is a fine line between precision and self-indulgence.”

Sometimes there’s a bit of theater mentor Sanford Meisner in Goldberg’s thinking:

“Writing, too, is ninety percent listening. You listen so deeply to the space around you that it fills you, and when you write, it pours out of you. If you can capture that reality around you, your writing needs nothing else. You don’t only listen to the person speaking to you across the table, but simultaneously listen to the air, the chair, and the door.”

Goldberg also spices her Bones with lots of free-spirited advice channeled through the likes of mystic authors Paramahansa Yogananda, Alan Watts and Ram Das s:

“Don’t ‘make’ your mind do anything. Simply step out of the way and record your thoughts as they roll through you. Writing practice softens the heart and mind, helps to keep us flexible so that rigid distinctions between apples and milk, tigers and celery, disappear. We can step through moons right into bears. You will take leaps naturally if you follow your thoughts, because the mind spontaneously takes great leaps.”

An uncertain neophyte writer would be well suited to try on this book for size.

* * *

“Three Uses of The Knife”

Mamet, David:

Three Uses of The Knife

New York: Columbia

University Press, 1998

David Mamet ranks among the world’s most renowned filmmakers and playwrights, but he also has produced scores of short essays which establish him as a thoughtful writing teacher in general. A Chicago native known for hard-boiled plots full of duplicitous women and street-scrabbled manly characters, Mamet’s bookshelf full of writing and performance offerings most often focuses on what he considers the essential question of drama:

What Happens Next?

That question must reside in the minds of every single audient during the unfolding of a drama from Rise to The End. The playwright must learn to instill in the audience a sense of anticipation, moment-to-moment, so they all each may ask themselves at every turn of phrase: What next? Good dialogue always punches that question.

The best of Mamet’s essay books is his 80-page dramatist’s crash course: “Three Uses of the Knife – on the Nature and Purpose of Drama”. Here Mamet offers a peek inside the structural tensions and clockwork mechanisms of drama – the succession of necessary beats that make a story worth staging.

The title of Mamet’s poignant pocketbook quotes Huddie William Ledbetter, also known as “Lead Belly”, who famously said a knife has three very distinct uses:

1. To slice the bread, so you'll have strength;

2. To shave, so you'll look nice for your lover;

and

3. To cut out her lyin’ heart when you find her in the arms of another!

Yes, and … nobody needs to interrogate Lead Belly on why he sang The Blues.

Mamet’s short book follows form of the classic Three-Act Structure, being broken into thirds like Lead Belly’s knife: Act I. “The Wind-Chill Factor”; Act II. “Second Act Problems” and Act III. “Three Uses of the Knife”.

Here, in a single paragraph, the playwright defines his dramatic writing process:

“Our understanding of our life, of our drama (and the drama on stage or screen can be nothing other than our understanding of our personal drama) – this understanding resolves itself into thirds: Once Upon A Time (narration that enables us to understand the difficulty/desire/goal of the hero), Years Passed (the middle time of struggles), And Then One Day (the inevitable yet unforeseen complication engendered, literally brought into being, by the quest of there in the middle term – the precipitation into the end struggle – which can be seen as the granting of the her’s wish, engendered in the middle term, for a clear-cut fight which would absolutely resolve the question at hand).

[emphasis added]

Mamet also recalls an allegorical writer’s in-sider joke: “One Use Of The Pretzel”

“There’s a great parable by Tolstoy about a man who was very, very poor. He had three small loaves of bread and a little pretzel. And he came home from working in the fields and he ate a loaf of bread. He was still hungry. So he ate the second loaf of bread and was still hungry. He ate the third loaf of bread. Then he ate the pretzel and was full. He said, “What an idiot I am. I should have eaten the pretzel first.”

Mamet knows Drama is more than metaphorically a musical conceit:

“So the dramatist, the blues writer in us, seizes upon the knife as both embodying and witnessing the interchange, subtly changing its purpose through the course of the drama. The knife becomes, in effect, congruent to the bass line in music. For the bass line, not the melody, gives music strength, and moves us.”

Dialogue Beats & Colloquial Verse

One way to measure the strength of scene is to hear the dialogue as if it were spoken in a foreign language. In that mind-set, your attention is on the rhythm of the words (the beats, or the bass-line) of the dialogue instead of any actual meaning the words may convey.

In “Three Uses Of The Knife”, Mamet points out that the pace of strong dialogue moves at the most common meter of English verse, iambic pentameter – any line of verse (or dialogue) has five metrical feet, each consisting of one short unstressed syllable followed by one long stressed syllable. Another way of hearing it: A line of verse (dialog) measures ten syllables long with the accents on every second beat.

And that goes a little something like this:

"taDA taDA taDA taDA taDA /

taDA taDA taDA taDA taDA."

Here’s how Mamet explains that rhythm working in dialogue:

“… in English, we speak colloquially, in iambic pentameter:

“I’m going down to the store to buy the cheese.”

“I told him, but he didn’t hear a word.”

“I swear I’ll love you till the day I die.”

“Not now, not later, never. Is that clear?”

If we listen we can hear people in a dialogue complete the iambic line for each other:

“I saw him on the street.”

“And what did he say?”

“He said leave him alone.”

“And what did YOU say?”

“What do you think I said?”

“Well, I don’t know.”

Here’s an outstanding video from the Royal Shakespeare Company on how their instructors introduce the rhythm of iambic pentameter – “the rhythm of the heartbeat” – to students learning to comprehend The Bard:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Qv-sjQHgZ8

(6:51)

What Happens Next?

After CBS cancelled its crime series “The Unit,” head writer David Mamet confronted colleagues in the writers room about their comprehension of dramatic writing. Below you will find Mamet’s beef with his suddenly out-of-work writers. His critique may be applied to any kind of written dramatic scene/plot structure including novels, short stories and unscripted stage pieces:

The job of the dramatist is to make the audience wonder What Happens Next, not to explain to them What Just Happened, or to suggest to them what happens next.

Any dickhead can write, “But, Jim, if we don’t assassinate the prime minister in the next scene, all Europe will be engulfed in flames!”

We are not getting paid to realize that the audience needs this information to understand the next scene, but to figure out how to write the scene before us such that the audience will be interested in What Happens Next.

The audience will not tune in to watch information. You wouldn’t, I wouldn’t. No one would or will. the audience will only tune in and stay tuned to watch drama.

Question: What is drama?

Drama, again, is the quest of the hero to overcome those things which prevent him from achieving a specific, acute goal.

So we, the writers, must ask ourselves of every scene these three questions:

1) Who wants what?
2) What happens if she doesn’t get it?
3) Why now?

The answers to these questions are litmus paper. Apply them, and their answer will tell you if the scene is dramatic or not.

If the scene is not dramatically written, it will not be dramatic.

http://www.slashfilm.com/a-letmamet-to-the-

Three-Plus-One David Mamet Links

Although he was listed among America’s most prestigious theater faculty at Yale and NYU, Mamet continues to offer his unique writing perspective to a broader audience in his books, essays and videos on line – including his Master Class on line:

https://www.masterclass.com/classes/david-mamet-teaches-dramatic-writing

The essential Mamet video:

“Why are you telling me this?”

https://youtu.be/vj5LUTZ1H9A?

(seven brilliant minutes)

Mamet's best film:

"The Spanish Prisoner"

(preview: 1:58)

Mamet's best caper movie:

"Things Change"

(preview: 1:46)

* * *

Plant Your Pencils

Fellow author Robert Kourik has spent four decades self-publishing his writings and lecturing about wise garden husbandry. When he learned I had tackled the topic of Writers Writing About Writing, he couldn’t help but forward the following links about a curiously transformative writer’s tool that – with the essential assistance of a little water – grows itself into a well-rooted living being shortly after its writing life has ended! It merely needs an author to plant it!

https://sproutworld.com/

https://inhabitat.com/sustainable-pencil-stubs-sprout-into-plants/

Follow Robert Kourik on line:

http://robertkouriksgardenroots.blogspot.com/

https://www.robertkourik.com/about.html

* * *

Essential Bookshelf for Dramatic Fiction Writers

Aristotle. The Poetics. Athens: classic Greek text, c. 335 BC

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1974/1974-h/1974-h.htm

https://www.stmarys-ca.edu/sites/default/files/attachments/files/Poetics.pdf

Egri, Lajos. The Art of Dramatic Writing. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1972

https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Art-Of-Dramatic-Writing/Lajos-Egri/9780671213329