Making art is a precarious balance of discipline and chaos.
I’m a firm believer in outlining, of erecting tentpoles before you set up camp. In TV and screenwriting terms, this means knowing basic stuff: who is this character and what do they want? What happens halfway through to raise the stakes? What’s the low point? How does my character’s worldview change by the end of the script?
I’ve written scripts where these structural touchstones were bullet-pointed within an inch of their lives. But last year, I wrote some of a novel (don’t be disappointed in me; my agent said I only had to write three chapters!) for which I knew my character and the premise, but the rest was discovered in the writing process.
I let the characters tell me where the story was going.
This is an idea that comes up a lot on The Writers Panel. And it’s an idea that I’ve wanted to write about for a while, but it’s also the most impossible thing to look up in my transcripts of the podcast! Seriously, I tried all kinds of search terms, but do you have any idea how frequently the guests and I say the words “character,” “story,” “decisions,” “the path,” and other vague terms like those?
So, no quotes from past episodes on this one.
Instead, I remembered a story that my friend Caissie St. Onge told me about a painting of Prince that she has in her house. Caissie is an extremely talented writer and producer who started out on David Letterman’s and Rosie O’Donnell’s shows and went on to produce Best Week Ever and Busy Tonight. She is also a lovely human and one of the funniest people I know.
Caissie’s story about her Prince painting is a perfect metaphor for this idea of having a plan for a script and then letting the characters take over the narrative. Here’s a recording of our conversation:
“The pancakes just didn’t assert themselves.”
I love that so much.
There was a great line in a recent book review I read by Alexis Schaitkin. About the main character in the novel she was reviewing, Schaitkin writes, “I had the sense that a fascinating woman was being constrained by the demands of plot.”
A lot of times I’ll work with new writers (and established writers) (and I frequently do this myself) who know exactly the story they want to tell, and who think they know exactly the way it should be told. And it’s easy to think this way. The story can sometimes be so clear in your head that, when you get to writing, it’s simply a matter of putting the character through the motions of the plot.
Part of that is confidence in telling one’s story. A good thing! But part of it is a rigidness that rejects better or different ideas, whether they’re from collaborators or from ourselves or from our characters. We—and our readers—can feel it when this happens because it feels like your characters are just going through the motions of the plot.
As Prince said, “You can always tell when the groove is working or not.”
Sometimes we’re working so hard at being a WRITER that we forget about just telling the story. More from Caissie and me:
Sometimes characters reject the choices you need them to make to serve your plot. Sometimes they rebel. These are the best parts of the writing process, when we’re deep in it and the world, and its inhabitants are as real as you and I.
There was an interview with Bill Hader around season 2 of Barry in which he talked about “following the truth of the characters,” and that’s why the show got as dark as it does. He said, “This is a man who kills people,” and added, incredulous, as if he wasn’t the creator of the show, “but I thought that it was a comedy!”
“This painting didn’t want pancakes,” Dan Lacy told Caissie.
Your story knows what it wants. And it’s not always what you planned for it.
When you feel this happening, when you feel your characters pulling you in a new direction, the best thing for you and for your story is to follow it and get yo groove on.
&tc:
Dan Lacy passed away a few years ago, but you can still visit his Twitter feed to see lots of his work. He posted a lot of works-in-progress over the years too, which is a lot of fun to explore.
The expression in this one just kills me:
The painting of Justin Bieber with pancakes over his genitals that Macklemore owns can be found here, if you’re really interested. It’s… more explicit than I’d anticipated. Also, I learned who Macklemore is.
Finally, I assume everyone has seen this already, but on the off chance you haven’t, or if you just want a pick-me-up today, watch this video of Prince, Tom Petty, Steve Winwood, Jeff Lynne, and Dhani Harrison performing at the 2004 Rock & Roll Hall of Fame tribute to George Harrison. Prince absolutely steals the show with his bonkers solo, to the clear delight of Dhani Harrison.
Also, Prince throwing the guitar at the end and then walking off stage without a backward glance is the coolest thing I’ve ever seen.
Have a good holidays weekend, everyone. Stay safe, and keep your dogs indoors!
You warned us and yet, it really is more explicit than anticipated. The pubes asserted themselves, I guess.
I loved this theme. The question of confidence versus lack of flexibility is something I think about a lot.