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Sunday, January 16, 2011
A Writer's Favorite Question
Today Bob in Pacifica asks, "What was your system for writing your book? Did you reserve so many hours a day? How did you structure the book prior to writing it?"
I have to tell you, this question is as welcome as "Can you tell me all about your vacation?" Everyone waits to be asked, no one does, we answer it anyway, and no one listens.
I learned a long time ago that reserving a set number of hours for writing never works for me. I just dread the hours and I figure out ways to waste time getting started and to cheat and finish early. Plus, there's no reward for productivity. If you have a good day or a bad day, you have to sit the amount of time.
So what I do -- what I always do -- is figure out a reasonable amount of work I should accomplish every day. This gives me an incentive to get started, to work with concentration and get it done as quickly as I can.
For this book, I decided I should write 2,000 words a day. If I was also writing an 800 word article that day, then I would have to write 1200 words in the book. Two articles, and I probably couldn't work on the book at all. No articles -- 2,000 words. I wouldn't always hit this target, but knowing what the target was made me work harder.
I made an outline for the first draft and wrote to that outline, knowing that what I was writing was probably not really the book. That what is so agonizing about first drafts. You know you're writing garbage, but you have to plow through anyway.
Then when that was over, I read it -- the first draft was 100,000 words long -- and I re-structured the book. I threw out some chapters, combined others. Moved things around. I suppose that eventually I'll take a look at the first draft again, but I would guess that fewer than 20 percent of any of the sentences in that draft made their way into the finished manuscript in anything resembling their original form.
With the second draft I was writing something LIKE what the book would turn out to be. After that, the book still needed a little re-structuring. Then there was a third draft and a tiny bit of restructuring, followed by a fourth draft.
The big structural challenge to this book was that all three ways of arranging it had drawbacks. Do each chapter about an individual actress, and you end up writing a long, long chapter about Nathalie Baye and tiny chapters about some others, and you end up, also, overlapping (because two people are in the same movie, or because the same themes are discussed in movies by other people).
On the other hand, if you do it thematically, you have a book with no narrative drive and little room, really, for talking about the women in their specificity. You wind up just discussing ideas, not movies.
Finally, if you just do it chronologically, it becomes a little like, "And then there was this movie, and then there was this other movie." Monotonous.
So the structural challenge made it necessary to write a whole first draft and get it all out on the page so as to be able to look at it and devise some intuitive arrangement that combined the strengths of all three arrangements and eliminated as many of the weaknesses of those arrangements as possible.
This was combined with the writing challenge of writing for an audience that knows nothing of the subject and isn't, perhaps, incredibly interested . . . while at the same time writing for an audience that knows something and IS very interested. That's why this book took four drafts before I could send it to my publisher with a feeling of its being done, while my first two books seemed in pretty good shape to me after the third draft. But in a way I think this is my best book. I hope so.
But I digress. The answer is it's always better, in my opinion, to give yourself a numerical goal when you're writing (a certain number of pages or words) rather than a set time to write, because knowing you have to sit in a chair for four hours no matter how hard you work means you'll end up checking your e-mail 40 times. You'll get less work done.
| Jan 16 at 10:39 AM
Thursday, January 13, 2011
Random Musings
This week I've been glad I'm not writing about politics, because were I doing so, I'd have been writing obsessively since Saturday, probably saying a lot of intemperate things (that I don't necessarily disagree with, even upon reflection) and then calibrating them and arguing and then having to comment on yesterday's speech, which (OK, I'll just say this) was just lovely.
In short, I would have wasted about eight hours of my time and given you plenty of pretexts to waste yours.
The thing is, though, just because I'm not writing about something doesn't mean I'm not thinking about it, and if that's almost ALL I'm thinking about, I have nothing else to say. Hence, the silence.
Meanwhile, today is the ONE MONTH anniversary of my last full-fledged foot attack. Probably no coincidence, it has also been about a month since my left foot hit the floor without a shoe on -- without a shoe on with a serious insole inside it. I've had twinges since, but not the big electrical pain, so I'm hoping -- really hoping -- that that's past. Along the way, my activity level has increased, to the point that I'm allowed 50 minutes of exercise walking every day, and I actually violated that the other day and walked 70 minutes at Tennessee Valley in Marin without incident. So I should be easing back into running in about a week or so.
I've also been enjoying some time off, not from the Chronicle -- the vacation's over -- but from any outside projects. I finished my book on December 20th and have given myself the luxury of a whole month without starting any new projects. The thing is, I've only written two going on three books, but I have attempted many more. In fact, I am just about all the time either writing a book or thinking I am. Anyway, it's amazing to not be pounding smashing and driving over here, so nice that I may extend the hiatus by a week.
One of the treats I promised myself a year ago, literally a full year or more ago, is that when I finished the book I would watch all the SEX AND THE CITYs again. And so I've started. Happily, I barely remember a lot of it. I started at Season 4, from 2001, figuring I can work my way back later. (I think I've seen both Seasons 1 and 2 more than once.) What a time capsule. The cell phones, the smoking in bars, the World Trade Center, Carrie's discovery of e-mail. I must also say, ten years too late, that I was never crazy about Aidan, who was by turns passive aggressive or goofy. Of course, Big started to look like Dracula at a certain point, but I always liked him better, anyway.
That's about it. Back to work. In the meantime, if you want to read something lovely, check out this detailed account of the scene at the hospital yesterday, when Gabrielle Giffords opened her eyes. It's really something.
| Jan 13 at 11:41 AM
Friday, January 07, 2011
The Three Degrees at the RRazz Room
The THREE DEGREES are at the Rrazz Room downtown. I can't hear WHEN WILL I SEE YOU AGAIN without being thrown right back to the whole feeling and atmosphere -- practically the smell -- of my first term of high school which was, surprisingly enough, a very happy time.
Anyway, this is what the Fall of 1974 felt like.
| Jan 07 at 11:31 AM
Thursday, January 06, 2011
As We Approach Oscar Season . . .
These are the best picture winners of the past decade: GLADIATOR, A BEAUTIFUL MIND, CHICAGO, LORD OF THE RINGS 3, MILLION DOLLAR BABY, CRASH, THE DEPARTED, NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN, SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE and THE HURT LOCKER.
Two, maybe three, great movies. Two or three very good movies, and a couple of mediocre ones, with SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE barely standing out as the decade's CHARIOTS OF FIRE.
So as we make our predictions, we shouldn't confine ourselves to what are actually the year's best pictures, because they are often not even nominated, and when nominated, they rarely win.
| Jan 06 at 10:54 AM
I Love How They Sell American Films in Europe
Every time I go to Europe, I'm always amused to see how Europeans sell our movies -- how they're retitled for a European audience, and what aspects each culture chooses to emphasize in order to encourage sales.
In France, GET HIM TO THE GREEK, I've just leaned, is called AMERICAN TRIP. I saw the movie twice and have no idea who the nude girl is to the right. I guess the idea is if you take a trip in America, this is what happens . . . and therefore everyone should see the movie.
| Jan 06 at 12:26 AM
Tuesday, January 04, 2011
"Complicated Women" on TCM
People always ask me -- OK, they occasionally ask me -- when they can see the COMPLICATED WOMEN documentary, which first aired on Turner Classic Movies in 2003. Well, set your Tivos for January 24th at 2:15 a.m. (in other words, very late on the 23rd if you're staying up.) That's Pacific Time. That's 5:15 a.m. Eastern time.
Notice how stations always air their very best stuff in the middle of the night? If people are watching anyway, say at 8 pm, you can toss anything on, like GONE WITH THE WIND. But if you really want to keep them up with something amazing, you roll out the COMPLICATED WOMEN.
Here's an outtake from the show. I think we used some of it. A few seconds.
| Jan 04 at 12:37 PM
Monday, January 03, 2011
Whose Life Would You Rather Have? -- and Update
Harlow (1911-1937)
In honor of the upcoming Harlow centennial: Whose life would you rather have? Would you rather be like Jean Harlow, who died when she was 26, but whose memory will be cherished for as long as there are movies, whose image and personality are indelible, who is an adorable and adored presence in cinema forever and ever?
Or Mary Dees, Harlow's stand-in, who is remembered almost entirely as Harlow's stand-in -- for being photographed, with her back to the camera, after Harlow's death, to fill in the final scenes of SARATOGA . . . but who died a month short of her 93rd birthday in 2004.
I'm not talking about the specifics of their lives, just the stature and the numbers. Revered forever but dead at 26? Or having a very unimportant (yet vaguely remembered) place in history but dead at almost 93?
Mary Dees (1911-2004)
UPDATE: The contrast between Dees and Harlow is pretty stark. For me, I think the only answer could be Dees, for a number of reasons: 1) 26 is really young, so young that you don't really know what's going on. Something kicks in at thirty that's like a second wave of perception -- astrologers think it has something to do with the solar system returning to the same configuration as at your birth every 29-plus years. In any case, to not have that experience is to miss the full circuit.
But there's also something else. To be an actor or actress is to be an interpretive artist. So it's not really to live in a state of ecstatic creation. It involves a lot of waiting. It's a glamorous life, but a lot of what glamor is is illusory. The red carpet is a lot more amazing from the sidelines. When you're on it, it's very nice, but you see the footprints. It's just people.
To be Mozart, on the other hand, is to go through life hearing music no one has ever heard before. It would be to exist in a flood tide of ecstasy, at least in your work. That would be a lot different than being Jean Harlow. So perhaps a better way to frame this question would be to ask, "Would you rather be Mozart, who died at 35 and wrote a series of immortal masterpieces -- or Luigi Cherubini, who died at 81 and made one opera that is still occasionally performed today ("Medea")?
Basically the Harlow question asks, "How important is it for you to be remembered?" The Mozart question asks something more complicated: "How important is it for you to be remembered, and would it be worth it to you to trade 46 years to have the privilege of that level of genius throughout your life?"
| Jan 03 at 09:52 AM
Sunday, January 02, 2011
What Did You Learn in 2010?
Every year we learn things. I learned that there are nerves in our feet, that Lagavulin 12 at natural cask strength is better than Lagavulin 16, and that it's better to pile up frequent flier miles for a first class upgrade than for a free flight in coach. I'm sure I learned lots of other things -- especially connected with the book I'm writing and the people I met with in connection with it -- but those are the first three that come to mind.
What did YOU learn in 2010?
| Jan 02 at 10:14 AM
Saturday, January 01, 2011
Johnny Carson
I'm on vacation and have been spending a lot of time -- time I didn't plan on spending, but I almost can't stop -- watching the 15-disc, 30 hour Johnny Carson collection, which is wonderful. (Check out David Wiegand's well-observed review.)
It is remarkable how Carson hasn't dated. If you want to see people as they really were, watch artifacts from that era that no one expected to last. Movies are always just a bit self-conscious, made in hope of the future's attention. Books and music as well. But a talk show recorded one night in 1974, before home video, before anyone thought of DVD -- nothing could seem more disposable, and therefore nothing could be more spontaneous.
(Game shows on the Game Show Network fall into this category, too.)
Anyway, I'll probably write more extensively about this later, but it's fascinating. Also fascinating is the way Carson got increasingly topical as time went on, so that, if you're aware of the historical timeline, you could guess, within a few months, when a show was broadcast just from internal evidence.
The place this guy occupied in American life was extraordinary. When I was a kid, seeing the TONIGHT SHOW playing on a TV screen meant that it was a holiday or some special occasion that allowed me to stay up late. It was something for grownups. When I was a teenager, I remember a friend said, "Oh, it's 11:30, let's put on Carson's monologue." And I was surprised, because Carson wasn't cool. He wasn't uncool, either. He was, I thought, something for the other generation. But gradually as I got older, people my age (teens and then twenties) began to see the show as something that belonged to us, too. I marvel at this man's appeal across so many demographics and generations.
Offhand, I think it had to do with two things: One was his self-effacing interview style (which was so relaxed -- he made it look easy; maybe it did come easy to him). And the second was something elusive in his make-up. You could get close to Carson but never fully know him. He held back something. He wasn't needy. He seemed like a nice guy, but you wouldn't want to get on his bad side. Woody Allen said that the only love that lasts is unrequited love, and something in Carson's demeanor let the audience in but kept it out in a way that made viewers want to keep coming back.
I knew he was there. I had no idea he was great.
| Jan 01 at 01:29 PM
Friday, December 31, 2010
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