“This is hell!” My screenwriting students say. “How can you do this year after year? It’s drudgery sitting at my desk for hours trying to come up with a story someone will want to read.” One writer I know calls his den The Torture Chamber. Norman Mailer said writing is the Spooky Art, “... where there is no routine of an office to keep you going, only the blank page each morning, and you never know where the words are coming from, those divine words.”
Yes, writing an original book, play, or screenplay can feel like you’re shoving Noah’s Ark up Pike’s Peak by hand. Then, you hear Cassandra whispering over your shoulder, “All this work is adding up to nothing.”
You know you shouldn’t, but you can’t help comparing your writing to Vonnegut's, Fitzgerald's and Munro's, always coming up short. What you thought was a solid idea when you sat down to write it can default faster than the Greek banking system.
There is, however, an opium for this kind of creative pain. I know it’s helped me.
Write about people whom you find entertaining.
Unconventional people. People who stand up to seemingly insurmountable problems. People burning with dreams. People who are their own worst enemy. Exceedingly bad people, exceeding good people, but most of all exceedingly interesting people who shake up your sense of decorum and expectation.
Ideally, these people should want something desperately, even if, in the case of Shrek, that something is just to be left alone.
Beginning writers often waste months ironing out a concept, or trying to figure out the intricacies of a plot, without having given much thought as to whom the yarn is about. Writing a story where the characters are secondary to a plot is like dancing without music. It’s okay for cookbooks and instruction manuals, I suppose, but you’ll never come up an Auntie Mame, Humbert Humbert, or Willie Loman.
Tip: put your characters in drastic, hilarious, or god-awful situations right away. Follow their reactions. They should lead the way. If they don’t, search for a new character who does.
Keep in mind, this is creative writing we’re talking about. Not journalism, not biography. To write a facsimile of your church-going third grade teacher, Mrs. Carter, can lead to narrative paralysis. The real Mrs. Carter would never allow Miss Barkley, the p.e. teacher, to kiss her. But what if the fictitious Mrs. Carter lets Miss Barkley smooch her? That would buck your reader’s expectations. In other words, allow the Mrs. Carters in your life to inspire you, but free them to do their own thing.
And don’t freak out about writing stereotypes. No offense, female p.e. teachers. The fun, like with Mrs. Carter, is to add contradictions to stock characters. Take the hit 1980s situation comedy “The Golden Girls.” Blanche is the slutty southern belle, Dorothy the tough Brooklyn Italian, and Rose the naive farm girl -- cliches all. But the writers artfully forced these stereotypes to reconsider what they believe, constantly pushing them out of their comfort zones while maintaining a core consistency. The result? Some of the most memorable characters ever created for TV. Sinclair Lewis, the first American writer to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, wrote chiefly about “types.”
Writing can be a lonely game, for sure, but if your characters consistently surprise you by what they do and say, you’ll soon find them great company. Who knows, you may even find them more interesting than a lot of people in your non-fictional life.
So, the next time your novel stalls like a New York taxi at rush hour, get out of the driver’s seat. Let your characters take the wheel. It’s easier for you, and it’s a hell of a lot more fun for the reader.
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