Two kinds of perfectionism
Cal Newport on two kinds of perfectionism:
The important part of my process — the part that separates this obsessiveness with the pathological variety — is that when my interval is done, I stop. Inevitably, I’m still well short of an ideal output, but what matters to me is not this specific outcome, but instead the striving for perfection and the deliberate practice this generates.
In other words, I want to keep getting better, not necessarily make this particular project the best thing ever.
I’ve thought about this before but never put it into words in my head. For me, this is the optimal framework: long-term perfectionism with a short-term focus on practice and shipping my work. This current film or script or project cannot be perfect (“you can only be as good as you are”) but if I do this every day for the next 20 years, I will get much much better at it. Perfect is probably a mythical unattainable goal, but very very good is attainable.
Or as The Last Psychiatrist puts it:
One of the great insights of psychoanalysis is that you never really want an object, you only want the wanting, which means the solution is to set your sights on an impossible ideal and work hard to reach it. You won’t. That’s not just okay, that’s the point. It’s ok if you fantasize about knowing kung fu if you then try to actually learn kung fu, eventually you will understand you can never really know kung fu, and then you will die. And it will have been worth it.
The Art of the Gag
I’m in love with these video essays by Tony Zhou. This one’s about how Buster Keaton did physical humor and it’s amazing to me how well these hold up today.
Deliberate Practice for Screenwriting
I’m a huge fan of Cal Newport and what he has to say about deliberate practice:
Similar findings have been replicated in a variety of fields. To become exceptional you have to put in a lot of hours, but of equal importance, these hours have to be dedicated to the right type of work. A decade of serious chess playing will earn you an intermediate tournament ranking. But a decade of serious study of chess games can make you a grandmaster.
Read the whole post, it’s good stuff. Actually, just read his whole damn book. It’s one of my favorite books I’ve read this past year and it’s more than just about how to get better at things, it’s a a treatise on “doing what you love” and why that is not very good advice — to paraphrase, you fall in love with what you get good at. There’s more but it’s late and I don’t have the brain power to paraphrase better. Just read it.
Anyway, so I had a thought last night while reading one of Newport’s blog posts. My thought was that while I’m fully on board with what he’s preaching, I haven’t really implemented it in a deliberate way. I do practice writing almost every day and I do read great screenplays and study films but when I write, I just set out to write something good with the goal of eventually writing something great.
But I haven’t taken the time to identify my weaknesses and deliberately work on them.
So. This morning I wrote out a list of what I think my weaknesses are. They’re based on feedback I’ve received from writer friends that have read my work, or from intelligent audience members at staged readings, or from industry script readers on the Blcklst. Plus some things that I just want to get better at, even if I’m already pretty good at them.
The goal is to stretch myself and also to generate a lot of new material that will eventually find its way into a film that I can shoot in 2016 on a low budget.
Here’s what I came up with:
- Writing stories with premises or ideas that are big enough to carry a movie but small enough to be shot with a micro-budget.
- Writing absurd comedy that also has character depth.
- Writing fascinating main characters (my supporting characters tend to be more interesting than the main character, which is not good).
- Writing unconventional but believable courtship/love scenes.
- Writing physical comedy.
- Writing suspense.
I’m going to tackle these in my weekday morning writing sessions (weekends are for other ongoing projects that need longer dedicated time periods to work through) by either brainstorming multiple ideas, scenes, or treatments for each item, depending on the nature of the skill.
Thoughts on Project Greenlight
This was the first season I’ve watched and I thought maybe as a beginning filmmaker it would offer some insight into the process.
I’m not sure that it really did because a lot of what went on in the show felt manufactured for drama. Maybe that’s the editing. I don’t know. After watching the first 20 minutes of the film that was made, The Leisure Class, I decided that the show was more about making an entertaining reality show than giving some kind of documentary insight into the process of Hollywood movie making.
Basically, all of the drama that happens on the show turns out to be mostly irrelevant to the final product. They spent so much time going back and forth about film vs. digital. It didn’t really matter. Sure, it’s beautifully shot, but everyone’s watching it at home on HBO, not on a big screen. While watching the show, I thought “man, you should take the extra shooting days! It’s your first rodeo, this will give you leeway to make mistakes!”
But it wouldn’t have mattered. The issue with the movie was the script and not the picture or the acting or the directing. I actually think Mann directed it well, at least from what I saw. The performances were good and the shots were good. The story had a lot of issues though, right from the start.
And I realized that yeah, HBO cared a lot more about making a compelling TV show than a compelling movie, because there’s no way, just no way that under any other circumstance would they have taken his script and said “yes, this is brilliant, we want to make this.”
It’s not like the premise was so terrible, it’s just that it’s not a final draft of a script. It’s an early draft with a lot of problems that could be solved and punched up. Or if not, they would shelve it and move on. I don’t think half the people on the show even read the script. The notes they were giving him on the rough cut were things that should’ve been fixed in development: Fiona’s character arc, Matt Damon telling him that there were issues with the main character — yeah, if you had read the script, you would’ve seen that coming.
The show left me wanting to hate Mann but I ended up thinking he’s pretty good as a director and might be a decent writer, but he really needed guidance on that front and they let him down. I think he would’ve been better off making his first feature on a $25k budget and learning all those difficult lessons in obscurity. It’s a lot easier to fail in obscurity. I can’t imagine anything worse than becoming a famous artist before your art merits fame.1
Within the realm of artistic careers. Obviously, there are worse things in life. ↩
Editing and Forwards
Episode 16 of Gimlet Media’s Startup podcast, titled “The Secret Formula” has a really interesting discussion about how Gimlet (and presumably This American Life and other highly-produced podcasts and radio shows) put together their shows.
The process is a lot like film editing, without the visual element of course. The episode basically turns out to be a how-to on how to edit a radio story and it’s comforting to know that it’s not an easy process. They start with a very rough cut, go through it and figure out where it “drifts,” and then making subsequent re-edits to improve the story until it’s working and interesting throughout.
It’s also comforting to know that this is more or less the approach I take when I edit video — whenever I get feedback (or give myself feedback), I look for the places in a script or the video where the action stalls. I really like the term drift though, because it’s more descriptive of the audience’s experience. Stalling is about the work, drifting is about the audience.
And they go into one technique that they use to keep people interested and moving forward, especially before a commercial break. They call it a “promote forward.”
The use of the term “forward” struck me because I just read a book called “Backward and Forwards: A Technical Manual for Reading Plays” by David Ball. The book is fascinating on a lot of levels. As a reader, I learned that my understanding of Hamlet as a brooding man of inaction is entirely wrong and that he doesn’t actually contemplate suicide, he only feigns to be depressed and crazy in order to convince Polonius et al. that he is.
I don’t know if there’s a “right” interpretation, but I had never thought of that one.
The book is intended for theater creators, mainly directors, but it also serves as a technical guidebook for play-writing or screenwriting without falling prey to the “paint by numbers” approach of most of the dreck written about screenwriting.
One of the theses of the book is that a good play (or dramatic writing of any form) uses forwards throughout to keep the reader moving. Ball summarizes it:
A forward is any of a myriad of devices, techniques, tricks, maneuvers, manipulations, appetizers, tantalizers, teasers, that make an audience eager for what’s coming up. If you miss a script’s forwards, you miss the playwright’s most distinctive, gripping tool. What stripper does not know that the promise of nudity more excites an audience than does nudity itself?
Effective dramatic writing hinges on the ability to keep the audience wanting to know what happens next. Forwards eliminate drift. Suspense isn’t relegated to certain genres; it’s everywhere.
Kiarostami on curiosity and cinema
But producers and directors of cinema have decided that the seats in the theaters have been made to transform people’s minds to lazy minds. As soon as they enter a theater they must become moron consumers who must be fed information. Those same people, when they leave the theater, when they look behind the curtains they are curious about their neighbors, they can guess if their neighbors are siblings or a couple, how old they are, what their occupation is. They are curious about each other and they can understand each other without being fed information. Why should it be different in cinema?
Timelessness in writing
If you shoot for timelessness in your writing, consciously orient yourself to the upper realm, the shining truths and the inexhaustible symbols etc., you will — by a kind of law — produce drivel. You will waft and drift and never get a toehold. If, on the other hand, you bet it all on the particular, really dive unreservedly into specificity, with no thought for higher things, you will find — inevitably, magnificently — that your novel about three plumbers in Milwaukee in 1987 becomes a singing blueprint of human significance.
– James Parker in Should Art Be Timeless or Should It Speak to Something More Current? (via)
Hitchcock/Truffaut documentary (!)
I read Hitchcock/Truffaut earlier this year. It’s a fantastic book. Hoping to catch the documentary at CIFF.
Multiple projects at once
I always have at least two things that I’m writing. One is the primary thing, the thing I set out to work on every morning. The other one (or two or three) is a backup.
This morning was a good example of why I like working this way. Sometimes I wake up and my brain doesn’t want to edit. It can’t edit. To rewrite something (where I’m at now with my primary script), I need to be able to focus and think critically. No way that was happening this morning. I went off caffeine completely about 4 days ago and my brain is not happy about it. My brain is foggy. My brain wants to binge-watch Seinfeld and it does not want to think critically about anything.
This hazy state is bad for rewriting but it’s fine for brainstorming. It’s actually better I think. It’s less critical and more open to new ideas. So I opened up a secondary project, which is for a script that I haven’t started in earnest yet. It’s just a few pages of notes that I’ve collected as ideas come into my head. And I found that I was able to come to a completely awesome realization that I was going the wrong way with the script and I found a completely awesome and new way to go with it, which I sort of vomited out ideas for for about an hour, long enough to make me feel OK about my writing for the day.