Writing Rules, Part One

Thank you to K. for this guest post...the first of several.  In fact, his original post was so long that I'm splitting The Rules up into a few different posts...so stay tuned!

K says:

In the past year I have found myself in a writing funk. All things ebb and flow, and maybe I was ebbing, but on a much deeper level I no longer felt excited about writing. I noticed that instead of having several ideas of writing projects a week, I would have one or none. There were many possibilities for this change—I was attempting to write long-form stories, mainly screenplays; I wasn’t satisfied with my screenplays, or my prose; My humor writing wasn’t interesting me; Writing stories is long and hard work; I wasn’t receiving much feedback; I didn’t feel like I was advancing my craft, etc. Part of this funk was going through a creative growth phase where I was attempting projects beyond my skill, but achieving (though not to my standards), while also learning about writing and myself along the way. So, fed up with feeling like I was writing inadequately I did a Google search for “rules of writing.”

I wanted to see what other writers, successful writers, had to say about writing. I wanted to know the rules that governed their craft and their world. What I found was great advice, sly sarcasm, black humor, and fellowship regarding the difficulty of writing and storytelling. Here’s one rule that says way more than the seven words she used:

The first twelve years are the worst. (Anne Enright, Rule #1)

Agreed. And I’m only in year four. Though that rule is like a cold bath of realism, some rules, or even sets of rules, were uplifting:

Write with gusto! (Ray Bradbury, Rule #1)

Of course! That might have been the first rule I was breaking in my own writing. I wasn’t writing the type of stuff that excited me on a basic level. Mostly because I was tying to balance what I thought was fun, with what I thought was “marketable.” I was definitely verging on breaking this one:

Don’t write for money or fame. (Ray Bradbury, Rule # 4)

Not that I was worried I might accidentally make money or become famous, but the “Is this saleable?” thought is always lurking somewhere in the back of my mind. And it must have been lurking somewhere in Bradbury’s mind, too, if he thought it was so important to put in his top five.

On the whole, I try to use these rules as guideposts to direct my creative energy and writing. Many of us only have a finite amount of writing or creative time. So it’s important to do it correctly and in the right humor. Here’s a quick distillation of the 137 rules gathered so far:

1. Write.
2. Love what you’re writing; don’t waste your time by writing what you aren’t intrinsically drawn to.
3. Don’t waste the reader’s time by overwriting (AKA The Ironclad Rule of Strunk & White: Omit needless words.)
4. Work on one project at a time until it is finished.
5. Love life; love people; have adventures.
6. Like yourself and your work.
7. Don’t worry about quality, that’s for rewriting.

Show Us Our Monsters

I've been *very* fortunate, over the past few years, to get to teach dramatic literature to high school students.  For the most part, these are kids who have had virtually no exposure to the dramatic canon beyond a couple of Shakespeare plays (indeed, I've often started the semester by having to explain what a "Canon" is and why it's a useful shorthand...and, in the same breath, explain the pitfalls of thinking about literature and theater in terms of Canon...trying to introduce a kind of "this is the man -- screw the man -- but by the way, since I decided what we're reading, for the purposes of this class I *am* the man, even though I'm making choices that aren't entirely in line with the man" -- some moral and intellectual jujitsu in the extreme).

I was running yesterday, thinking about that perennial "what is theater, what's it supposed to do in the world, and what do I want *my* work to do in the world"...and I started flipping through my syllabus.  Hedda Gabler.  Antigone.  Medea.  Death of a Salesman.  Betrayal.  Fences.  Joe Turner's Come and Gone.  Three Sisters.  Hamlet. Glass Menagerie.  Streetcar.  (Yeah, I play it traditional -- let 'em read Fences in 10th grade and discover Funnyhouse in 13th).

So what do those plays *do?*  And what do I most appreciate about them?  My feet pound the pavement and a phrase floats through my head: "they're all monsters." I started thinking about Hedda in particular -- here was a character so monstrous she had people walking out of theaters in protest.  But what was most terrifying?  Why had Ibsen hit such a nerve?  Because Hedda was a monster for her time.  A society that repressed its women, that elevated the military, a place where you were expected to have children rather than ambition, where you had less chance for education, where sex and alcohol and everything else happened at stag parties or actresses' boudoirs or swept under rugs...Ibsen's own...that was the breeding ground for a woman like Hedda -- heartless, frustrated, violent, petty, machiavellian, miserable, trapped.  She did what she had to do for her spirit to survive -- which, in the end, was kill herself.  And when the audience had to face that idea, that this creature was, somehow, a creature of her time...out of the theaters they flew.

Feet still pounding.  Now to the rhythm of a single sentence:

Show us the monsters of our own making.

It's clean.  And if you apply it to ANY of the plays above, those "classics," I think you'll find it holds.  Now, of course, you've gotta interrogate some of the words in that sentence:  gotta define monster, gotta define the "us," gotta define what what we mean by "our own making."

Briefly, I'll say the the "us" is the people the play is being written for, and (somehow) the group of which the playwright is a member (albeit, perhaps, a disenfranchised member -- even the Occupy-Social-Anarchist is a member of the Capitalist Pig System, even if he inhabits a different place in it than his Wall Street brother).  Make it something the playwright owns somehow.  Wilson was talking about a small stretch of land in Pittsburg, and he was also talking about America-with-a-capital-A.  Salesman was talking about the new Capitalist America, a world full of advertising, where the American Dream was being twisted into something that relied on a man's ability to sell himself rather than make something of himself.  Antigone was looking beyond the borders of Athens, but it was looking at three different visions of government, and the perversions of each.

"Our own making" I touched on with Hedda -- it was the specific time, place, social condition in which Ibsen placed the play (and in which he lived) that gave rise to a woman like Hedda...which is exactly why she was terrifying.  But so, too, was Biff "made" by a culture that glorified athletics over intelligence, that told him "father knows best" and that lent itself to hero-worship.  So, too, was Willy made by a nation of automobiles and mortgage payments and traveling salesmen.  So was Blanche the remnant of a dying era, easily mown over by Stanley who was, in essence, the new face of the American post-war meritocracy.

And "monster?" I'm gonna call monster the perversions, the by-products, of what we see happening around us.  If you ever saw the (terrible) 80's movie "Twins," in which Arnold Schwarzenegger and Danny DeVito play test-tube twins separated at birth, you'll remember the wonderful scene where Arnold is told by a scientist that he was all the best qualities in a phalanx of scientists, athletes and artists...and Danny is told he was all the shit that was left over.  The MONSTER is all the shit left over, the awful, twisted by-product of an age's best intentions.

A fun thought experiment:  If Hedda was her time and place's monster, what does Today's Hedda look like?  Today's Willy Loman?  What monsters are we making now...what do they fight for...and what happens when they take center stage?