Developing Story Ideas Page 3

  Looking at the many students whose works I had helped midwife into being, I saw that each had moved toward taking possession of some core truth. I saw that only slowly and imperfectly do we grasp what drives us. Yet something within us knows all along, leaving the outer person to cajole and commune with the inner person in search of the inner, motivating truths.

  I realized that to speed one’s progress as an artist, one must find what marks one’s life has left. Working in an art form will always further this search, for as we dare to go closer to the core of our being we get better at our craft, and as we improve our craft, we go closer to our personal truths. The two are symbiotic.

  Wanting to Tell Stories

  Thus we need to tell stories, to hold people’s attention by entertaining them. Any comedian will tell you that we do it best by exploring our own inner tensions. As a result, we see better where we are, and why. Truth liberates, and pursuing it connects us with other souls treading the same highway. Think of Dorothy hitching up with her three friends on the Yellow Brick Road. The tale is about finding oneself alone and getting up the courage to join others along the road of life until you become fully, courageously, exultantly alive. L. Frank Baum (1856–1919) expressed this and much else through his children’s book, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, which, translated into its classic 1939 cinema form, has entertained untold millions of young people.

  Self-Exposure and Giving Support

  To act on the self-discovery material in this book means showing who you are to the people around you and trusting that they will help you along your own, personal Yellow Brick Road. If this makes you nervous, do not worry: you are always in control of what you let show. Consider, however, that to become an artist means you cannot stay in hiding long-term. Conflict and insecurity are as normal as breathing, and artists explore the territory they have been given in order to comprehend it. By taking risks, you will become a natural leader in any story development group. Your example will challenge even the shyest to push their boundaries.

  The corollary is that whoever takes risks by showing him- or herself, let them know you appreciate their courage. Good collaborators have generous souls.

  What Is Therapy and What Is Art?

  People sometimes assume that art and therapy are the same. But therapy exists to reduce pain to manageable proportions and restore a person’s appetite for living. Art is freer and outward looking. If your emotional conflicts are particularly present and pressing, you may have to put art-making aside and seek the help of a compassionate professional. You need not and cannot make art if you are drowning.

  That said, many who write well do so from a deep impulse for salvation and change. I once interviewed the Italian writer Primo Levi, who worked as an industrial chemist in Italy most of his life. His Survival in Auschwitz (title in England, If This Is a Man) is acknowledged to be the most restrained, graphic, and profound account of life amid the surreal cruelty of the Nazi death camps. He told me that many prisoners had the same premonitory dream—that you had somehow escaped, got home, and had begun telling a loved one about what had happened to you. Then, as you spoke, the listener got up and left, which was devastating.

  Levi got home and had this experience first with his parents, and later in life with his children. None who loved him could bear to hear what he had suffered. Soon after getting home he sat down in his mother’s house and wrote for six weeks without stopping. He then put his account away in a drawer for a decade without reading it. “This put a diaphragm between me and the experience,” he said. Later, when the manuscript saw the light of day, it became the classic account, the masterpiece about human endurance and survival that nobody ever forgets.

  People have to make art to grapple with the mystery of human existence and to share with others the enigmatic patterns, meanings, and mysteries of what is. Art sets out to frame questions, sometimes to explain or celebrate. Mostly it pursues what we feel most deeply, what we yearn for and cannot explain. Making it and touching others has to be rooted in your deepest preoccupations, which are usually hidden from you.

  What Stories Mean

  When you make stories, your work cannot stop at showing what is typical and plain for all to see. That, after all, is the job of a mirror. Somehow you must find what you alone perhaps can make visible. “A work of art,” said Victor Hugo, “is a corner of nature seen through a temperament.”1 By articulating what you alone can see through the lens of your own vivid and particular intelligence, you can aspire to give us the sights, sounds, and questions in a world wholly your own, but one joined to ours by our common humanity. You will get there by refusing all that is facile, common, and ordinary. This means improving what you make, draft by draft, until you have perfected to the best of your ability all that was imperfect.

  Whether you aim for fiction or nonfiction, you will need provocative ideas. In making documentary films as I once did, you follow a typical craft cycle that begins with the same research that fiction writers undertake. Documentary is a branch of drama—one that happens to draw on a ready-made world rather than one invented. Gaining entry to your chosen world, you meet particular people living actual situations. As their trust in you grows, they let you into their lives, and clues come to you about what “the real story” may be. Clues lead to discoveries, discoveries lead to hypothetical breakthroughs, and then breakthroughs reward you with ideas and insights on a larger scale. A project that began as a miner’s strike story emerges as one about ruthless top-down power by government.

  Your piece keeps growing and changing. You are trying to impose greater clarity, draw better causes-and-effects, find greater dramatic inevitability. Like any form of storytelling, you aspire to make your audience experience strong feelings, and through those to illuminate a corner of human life. Again and again, your discoveries depend on an instinctively concurring note in yourself, a capacity to recognize what is deeply true. This often comes from empathically seeing into another person, from seeing their dilemmas as if they were your own. By trying, you almost become that person, and it can be as intense as falling in love.

  As you end one story, another begins, emerging naturally out of questions left unanswered by the old. The larger the questions, the greater their depth of meaning. Why else would people still want to see the works of the Elizabethan glovemaker’s son Will Shakespeare?

  Theme and Variation

  Artists with a body of successful and expressive work quite often have only one or two deeply felt themes in all their work. This doesn’t leave them limited, for a strong theme, like a powerful melody, liberates a writer to explore a whole universe of variations. In Bach’s amazing Musical Offering, the simple melody suggested by his royal employer progresses by stages into a whole musical cosmos. The piece ends with a six-part fugue, so that listening to the whole is like being present at the birth of music itself. At YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KYouXtuk0T8) you can hear it and see an ingenious visual representation of Bach’s intertwining melodic lines.

  Just Do It

  Genius is not conferred at birth and waiting to be liberated. Rather, it comes from working hard at something that deserves your love. The London artist and teacher Peter Baer believed that anyone could become a decent painter by simply working at painting for twenty years. Writers all say something similar. The “just do it” approach always brings rewards, no matter what kind of work you do. It’s a stubborn way of insisting that the whole world is already inside you.

  Outline and Expansion

  The work in this book takes you high and fast over a lot of terrain. It never asks you to polish or rework a piece. That comes when you decide to move beyond the ideation stage and expand your work into a finished artifact. That process lies largely beyond the scope of this book, but the last chapters prepare you to do this. Bear in mind that a work’s final form also takes many, many incarnations. Writing is really all about rewriting.

  Collaboration

  Particularly when story-making
is collaborative, you will sometimes have to stand your ground tenaciously, or risk seeing your prerogatives plucked away by strong-willed colleagues. At important moments, be ready to hold on quietly to your ideas and principles. Before you make any important changes, always try to take time to consider what your critics have said. They may maul you, but they will have to respect you.

  Collaborating with other people is a wonderfully social and energizing way to make something. The cinema owes its ascendency to being made by artistic collectives.

  Note

  1Émile Zola, Mes Haines (1866 essay by the French novelist writing in the literary school of naturalism).

  Part II

  The Roots of Invention

  Tales that entertain, disturb, or thrill us come not only from authors but through them. Because writers are artists creating a “corner of Nature seen through a temperament,” they work long and hard to recognize and develop what is particular to their way of seeing.

  Preparing for this does not have to be intimidating. In fact, a pleasant and surprising discovery awaits you: you already have a focused inner drive that is waiting to become useful. I think of this as your artistic identity, something that will be forever on hand to guide and inspire you, once you get to know it. Even if you never learn of its existence in your psyche, you will still benefit. I know this because I directed two dozen documentary films before discovering with a shock that my work—maybe my whole life—had been shaped all along by a common theme.

  Artistic identity is the source of creativity each of us carries within. Shaped by temperament and biographical circumstances, it is the inner force directing our search to complete our unfinished business.

  What a lot of time and effort I could have saved had I known this earlier!

  3 Finding Your Artistic Identity

  The twin drives to find sustenance and meaning are so deep in the human psyche that we perform them unconsciously, like breathing. Maybe it all began during our millions of years as nomadic wanderers, anxious about bodily and spiritual survival and apprehensive about being accepted by the tribe. From the first paintings in caves and the first symbolic statuettes and sculptures, art has always dealt with these primordial human quests.

  How do you begin to make art? By searching in depth for what you need, for what truly matters to you. The respected actor and directing teacher Marketa Kimbrell used to say, “To put up a tall building you must first dig a very deep hole.” The authors of Art and Fear concur, saying that “the only work really worth doing—the only work you can do convincingly—is the work that focuses on the things you care about. To not focus on those issues is to deny the constants in your life.”1

  Unfinished Business: How Your Life Has Marked You

  Each of us has had formative experiences—usually sustained at high and low times in our lives—that leave us with sensitized scars that one can think of as marks. Ignored and unresolved, these marks remain as clues to unfinished business. Thus it is perfectly true that “the unexamined life is not worth living.”2 That drive you have to discover and express is really the urge to recognize the marks you carry and the desire to do the work they want you to do.

  Anyone who begins identifying their unfinished business soon finds a theme or two. Mine proved to be “breaking out of imprisonment.” Within moments of realizing how widely it applied to my work, I literally shivered at seeing its origins in my early life.

  A way to give attention to your unfinished business is to make this simple vow: I will tell no story unless it contains something, however small, that I discovered for myself. But, you protest, nothing of importance has happened to me yet. I have nothing to give, nothing to say!

  Not true. Everyone from their teens onward has had a taste of every human experience. Metaphorically, you have seen death, been in love, lost a kingdom, fought battles, defied death, been a refugee. You have given, taken, sacrificed, betrayed—because that is what it means to be human.

  You do not have to confess any of this unless you particularly want to. Making stories only requires you to care deeply about what people do and why they do it.

  Displacement

  As everyone knows, fiction writers routinely conceal their sources in life by obscuring and displacing telltale details. They alter names, places, the time-period, appearances, and even the gender of their human models.

  Indeed, you are free to take any liberty providing your audience can still see credible characters in a credible world. Under the fig-leaf of fiction, you can amalgamate individuals from actuality and create a more comprehensive type of person in your sea captain, one perhaps more true and universally representative. You can split the contradictory aspects of your brother to form two warring neighbors.

  Displacing means fictionalizing factual identities. Concealing the characters and circumstances you have used for your fiction lets you explore underlying truths and your relationship to them, but without falling into the legal quicksand of autobiography.

  Authors do this because examples from life are often fragmentary and partial, and perhaps do not allow you to tell the whole story. Documentary filmmakers frustrated by all they cannot put on the screen sometimes turn to fiction, and vice versa. Michael Apted’s Incident at Oglala (1992) questions the justice of putting the Native American leader Leonard Peltier behind bars (Figure 3–1). His next work, Thunderheart (1992), was a fictional treatment of the same events that proposes how the FBI made Peltier responsible for the deaths of their agents. Both films are set in the same world, look at the same problems, but use alternative strategies to explore injustice.

  To act on your artistic identity, you need only take up the special work it throws in your path. This may be science work, arts work, medical work, building work, family reparation work, parental work, teaching work, Girl Scout work, historical reconstruction work, psychological work, acting work, writing work, or any other work. There is one proviso: its importance shows itself by making you fearful. Thus important work involves striving to understand and overcome fears.

  Here are some assignments to help you find your marks and make a start.

  Figure 3–1 Michael Apted’s Incident at Oglala and Thunderheart use documentary and then fictional means to explore the same injustices (frames from the films).

  Themes are the persistent meanings lying beneath the surface of narratives. Your own, once you find and accept them, will lead to your unfinished business—and vice versa.

  Assignment 3–1: Making a Private Self-Inventory (Marks and Themes)

  Make notes, privately and nonjudgmentally, of the marks you carry. Do so freely since you need divulge nothing that is private.

  Step 1: List your key experiences. By writing in rapid, brief notations whatever comes to mind, make a private, nonjudgmental list of any experiences in your life that profoundly moved you (to joy, rage, panic, fear, disgust, anguish, love, etc.). Keep going until you have six or ten. Some will seem “positive” (accompanied by feelings of joy, relief, discovery, laughter), but most will seem “negative” and have disturbing emotional connotations such as humiliation, shame, or anger. Try not to suppress or prioritize, since doing so is to censor, which is just another way to prolong the endless search for acceptability. Truth is neither negative nor positive, it is just truth!

  Step 2: Divide your life into chapters and about each chapter ask What was I trying to get, do, or accomplish? When you have no answer, improvise something that fits plausibly with your actions and predicaments at the time. An artistic identity is always a work in progress that takes inspired guesswork.

  Step 3: Arrange your key experiences in groupings. On a large piece of paper, group them in any way pertinent. This useful technique, known as clustering, will help you discover inherent relationships, connections, and hierarchies.

  Step 4: Note down any theme(s) arising from your mapping.

  Assignment 3–2: Presenting an Important Experience and Its Meaning

  Make any brief notes you may
need to help you make a presentation. The more candid you can be, the better, but you need disclose nothing too private. Everything that needs to happen will do so in its own time.

  Step 1: To a person, class, or group, relate an experience that marked you. Make the whole presentation no longer than five minutes, and wrap up with a summary of its meaning.

  Step 2: Relate your current writing intentions by completing these sentences: The kinds of subject for which I feel most passionately are …

  Probably the main theme behind my work will be …

  Other goals I presently have for my work are …

  An artistic identity is not fixed and terminal, so you are not narrowing your scope by naming it. Rather, you are defining a position from which to make an exploratory artwork. With every new project come discoveries that help you refine and redefine this facet at the core of your being.

  Assignment 3–3: What Is the Family Drama?