Practice writing

Returning to Jane Austen, another thing I admire is how different her primary characters were. I know that there are people who get really annoyed with Catherine Morland, but you still have to be impressed that someone who gave you Eliza Bennett gave you Catherine too.

Let’s revisit the questions in my post, “So which one are you?”

http://sporkful.blogspot.com/2012/09/so-which-one-are-you.html

The short answer was none and all, with the point being that you can only write what you can conceive of, but that there should be variety in that. Looking at my characters, I have found pretty good variety, but there are two things I have never done with any of my heroines. I have never had a dumb one and I have never had a blonde.

I didn’t think it was a matter of going with the stereotype of dumb blondes, because I know better than that, but it also made me feel like I should try and stretch myself a little, and I wasn’t sure how to start.

Now, covering both at the same time would be reinforcing the stereotype, which is probably bad, but I did find kind of a solution in that I know someone who is blonde and an idiot, and if I based a lead character on her, I think I could do it. And just thinking about that in terms of zombies gave me all sorts of interesting ideas, so I think there may be something here.

Sometimes I do get ideas about things I haven’t tried, and could try, and usually from that perspective it is about challenging myself as a writer, and sometimes thinking they would be fun to write.

Usually, my writing is dictated by the idea that has taken a hold of me. Twice now, kind of three times, I have worked on someone else’s idea, and those have all been learning experiences, with a fair amount of frustration too, but that was part of the learning.

Anyway, I do have projects in mind that I would like to try, and some of them could totally happen, but it’s a matter of priorities. For example, I am putting off writing episodes for existing shows, or trying to get into television writing. I don’t want it enough. (I would still love to see Dark Horse do a Grimm comic at some point, and would not mind being involved with that, but I think you don’t start comics until after the show has ended, so no hurry.)

One thing that I had wanted to do was based on a contest that I cannot find now. I thought it was DIVX, but that’s a format. Anyway, they would periodically set up new themes, and people would submit six minute films. It occurred to me that it could be a really good thing to have a month where I wrote one six-minute script per day, just to keep me doing things differently, and to build some discipline. Lately though, I have been pretty disciplined anyway. I’m not ruling it out, and probably November would be the month to do it, because that is the month when other people are writing novels or blogging every day, but if I’m already working on something, I’m probably just going to stick with that.

Another thought was that it could be interesting to make one of those celebrity-packed holiday flicks, like Valentine’s Day or New Year’s Eve, but maybe not stupid. One way of doing it that could be interesting would be to work in the cast of Portland-based shows, so when writing having in mind the actors from Grimm, Leverage, and Portlandia. Then, another way to make that interesting, and to guard against problems if you can’t get buy-ins from each cast, would be to make the movie in cast segments, so that even though the scenes are interwoven, you could remove one cast and still have a cohesive film. That way, you could have Portlandia-Grimm, or Portlandia-Leverage, or Grimm-Leverage, no matter who you get. That would probably make the movie less interesting, and more disconnected, but trying to make it work would be a challenge. I am leaning towards making the holiday in question Flag Day, but maybe Arbor Day or Earth Day is more Portland.

The truth is, there are always plenty of contests out there, some of which would involve submitting what you already have, and some of which involve you taking someone else’s pitch and developing it. Ultimately if I do not feel good about an idea I probably won’t develop it, meaning that the next time I start a screenplay it’s probably still going to be zombies and/or love. I’ll know when I get there.

There has been something else that I have wanted to do, though, for a different kind of writing, and I am not ruling it out. There was a point when every time you got asked to speak in the singles ward they asked you to base it on a specific conference talk. I was not asked to speak during that point, so I never did it, but I liked the idea. First of all, it is just a starting point. That talk has already been given, so you are still going to come up with your own thoughts and experiences, but in the process of preparing, you would get to know that talk really well, and maybe you would get extra things out of it that you did not get just listening the first time and then reading later.

Anyway, I thought that I could write a talk based on every talk, and just work my way through the conference issue. One of my neuroses is the thought that I will miss something important (or interesting or cool), and that seemed like something that would help. The problem again was time. Still, there was one talk that has really affected me from the last conference, and I am going to write a blog post on that.

Also, I have thought about starting a magazine based on interviewing different people and getting into what makes them tick. It started with an issue of Smithsonian where they were talking about Andrew Steele who as a student (and I think it was graduate student in college, but still) offered to help get better pictures of some Mars rocks, and they accepted, and he just invents things to get what he needs done, and I was thinking, what is inside that mind? And then I saw a really handsome man on the Metro in DC, at the Pentagon stop, and his rank and his age indicated that he had risen through the ranks fairly quickly, and yes, I noticed him because he was good looking (think Viggo Mortensen in A Perfect Murder), but he was interesting too. And also there was a Smithsonian article about Brazil wood, and they talked to someone who made violin bows out of it, and I guess I just realized that it’s interesting how we start and where we end up and the path between. Smithsonian takes interesting subjects and the people come up in relation to that, but what if you focused on people?

If we had world enough and time enough...